In almost every artistic training program the world over, regardless of the specific creative discipline, the pursuit of perfection is a driving factor in the training. I spent hours in the practice room during my conservatory training practicing the same passages over and over to get closer to that ever-elusive “perfect” ideal. Lessons and masterclasses were fine-tuned examinations of the details of technique, always in search of a better, cleaner, “more perfect” sound. There is a lot in that mindset that is commendable and valuable, but in my work with artist business owners, I see too many creatives willing to die in that pursuit of perfection. They are allowing perfect to be the enemy of good. Don’t let yourself fall into that trap. Let go of perfection and focus on your progress.

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Hello, and welcome to episode 32 of the Starving Artist No More podcast! I am your host, Jennifer Jill Araya, and I’m so excited to be here today and share with you some thoughts and mindsets that will hopefully help you on your creative entrepreneurship journey.

Before we dive into this week’s discussion of progress over perfection, I do want to mention that I have a free resource available on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. I’ve worked with quite a few creatives over the past few weeks who have really been struggling with the financial aspect of their business, and this is something that is so understandable. Most of us went to fine art school, not business school! And yet now we’re expected to manage a business – because a creative business is still a business with all the attendant bank accounts and tax reports and legal documentation and on and on and on. It can be so overwhelming! I have something to share that I think can really help. It’s a free guide titled, “Say Goodbye to Feast or Famine: Three Financial Must-Haves for Creative Entrepreneurs,” and it’s available, absolutely for free, on my website. Just visit www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com and fill out the contact form to get it sent directly to your inbox. Finances aren’t easy, but they don’t have to overwhelm you. You can get a handle on your business finances, and this free guide can show you how.

From finances to progress – let’s switch gears and turn to the main topic of today’s episode. Progress, not perfection. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Done is better than perfect. 80% done is 100% awesome. If you’ve coached with me in any capacity at all, you’ve probably heard me use all of those phrases at some point. Goodness, my email newsletter last week included that last one, 80% done is 100% awesome.

What those three little sayings have in common is their stress on doing what you can when you can as well as you can, and letting the rest go. And oh how hard that can be. One personality trait that most artists and creatives have in common is at least some measure of perfectionism. At least on some level, we strive to always be better and do better and make better art and create better stuff. We want to be perfect. Maybe not perfect in every area of life – I know I gave up on that a looooong time ago! – but we at least want to be perfect in our art.

My goal, every time I walk out on the stage to play a concert, is to hit every note perfectly in time and in tune, and with a beautiful sound that blends well with my fellow performers. My goal, every time I close the door to my booth and open up my manuscript to record an audiobook, is to perfectly capture the nuances of the characters and the stories and to co-create with the author a stellar audiobook that will touch and move everyone who listens to it.

You probably have similar goals in your art. You strive every time for your painting to perfectly create the effect you’re aiming for, or for your photograph to have the perfect composition and the perfect lighting balance. For your performance in the play to perfectly capture the audience’s attention, or for your music performance to perfectly convey every nuance of the melodic lines. It’s part of our nature as creatives to want our creations to be as good – as perfect – as they can be.

And yet this paradox exists: perfect is always our goal, but perfect can never actually be achieved. There is no such thing as a perfect performance or perfect painting or perfect photograph or perfect sculpture or … or … or. Perfect is always our pursuit, but perfect can never actually be achieved.

Owning that paradox, truly accepting it deep down in our souls and finding a way to live with it, is hard. And I see so many creatives get hung up there. They somehow can’t accept that perfect isn’t possible, and they let that keep them from doing anything at all. They can’t do the thing exactly as they have envisioned or imagined that the thing must be done, and so instead, they don’t do it at all. They allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

Unfortunately, when creatives do this, they stunt their own growth. The way to get good at something – at anything! – is to do it, and to do lots of it. There’s the old “10,000 hours” maxim that comes to us from Malcolm Gladwell. There’s no denying that when you want to learn how to do something well, focusing on quantity will actually get you to that goal of perfection (or at least as close to perfection as it is possible to be) faster than focusing on quality.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of a ceramics professor who divided his students into two groups. One group would be graded purely on the number of pieces they produced at the end of the year. A higher number of finished items would equal a higher grade. The other group of students would be graded based solely on the quality of their work. They would need to produce only a single perfect pot to get an A. Didn’t matter how many total pots they created throughout the semester, all that mattered was that they be able to submit a single perfect pot for grading at the end of the class.

At the end of the semester, the professor evaluated both groups as he said he would in terms of their given grades, but then he took a step back and, for his own purposes, evaluated the quality of the work before him. Without exception, the works of the highest quality all came from the students who were being graded by quantity. The quality students got stuck trying to make that “one perfect pot” and so didn’t actually improve their skills over the course of the semester. The quantity students had to create lots of pots and create them quickly, and they learned by doing. Their skills improved drastically because they spent the time doing the thing.

A fun little sidenote of this story, that I think makes it even more special: this story, as I just paraphrased it, originally was published as a parable in David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art and Fear, but when James Clear published the story in Atomic Habits, he changed the setting to a photography class. Writer Austin Kleon, who I’ve referenced here on the podcast before, caught that switch and wanted to find out what was up. Kleon did a bit more digging and discovered where it came from: The true basis for this quality-vs-quantity story comes from University of Florida professor Jerry Uelsmann, who, one year, ran this exact experiment on his Beginning Photography students. But when Bayles and Orland, who are both photographers, were writing their book, they wanted to use a parable that stepped outside their own creative discipline and showed the universality of the importance of quantity in art. So they changed the medium to ceramics.

Quoting Orland: “The intriguing thing to me is that it hardly matters what art form was invoked—the moral of the story appears to hold equally true straight across the whole art spectrum (and even outside the arts, for that matter).”

And that truth is that the more you do something, the better you will get at it. But if you focus only on getting better without actually doing the thing, you won’t make much, if any progress. Quantity leads to quality. Progress comes from actually doing the thing, not from trying to be perfect while doing the thing.

Quality is the destination, quantity is the path. Perfection is the (unattainable but ever motivating) ideal, but doing the thing and making progress while doing it is the immediate goal.

In your business, when you’re working on your projects and finalizing those creations or those works of art for delivery to your customers, focus on finishing. Focus on your quantity. Yes, absolutely, do the very best work that you are capable of doing. But don’t let yourself obsess or get sucked into the need to make that delivered work of art “perfect.” Done is better than perfect, always. Even more, done and delivered on time is better than perfect, every single time.

In my work as an audiobook performance coach, I’ll occasionally have a student who tells me that they spent over an hour tweaking a five minute audition excerpt, or that they spent three hours editing one finished hour of the audiobook they’re working on. And yes, I know that those editing skills take time to develop and don’t come naturally, but when a student tells me that they’re spending that much time working on something, I know they’re focusing on perfection and not being satisfied by a job well done.

When you’re looking at the quality of your work, focus on your progress over time. Are you creating a “more perfect” product now than you were a month ago? A year ago? Two years ago? Are you making progress in improving your creative and artistic skills? If you can answer yes, then you are achieving the goal. You are doing exactly what you need to be doing to grow as a creative, as an artist. Quantity over quality. Progress over perfection.

I see a lot of creatives fall into this “perfection” trap in their artistic work, but that’s not the only area of our lives as creative entrepreneurs where the ideal of perfection can trip us up. One big area where I see this come up over and over is when I talk to my coaching students about establishing Supportive Habits for themselves within their artistic businesses.

If you want to learn more about what habits have to do with building your creative business, listen back to Episode 16 of this podcast, where I talk about the Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business, one of which is Supportive Habits. But for now, it’s enough to say that Supportive Habits matter because you matter. Because you are a creative entrepreneur, the products or projects that you sell are only as fresh and unique and creative and wonderful as you are yourself. If you’re having an off day, your art, your creations, will reflect that. In that old pursuit of perfection, perfection may not really ever be possible, but it’s definitely not possible if you’re stressed and sleep-deprived and haven’t eaten a good meal in over a week. Establishing Supportive Habits around your work is necessary to allow you to be well and whole and capable as you enter the creative process.

When I’m working with an artist, I’ll go over the importance of Supportive Habits, and so often they’ll stop me right there and throw up road blocks. “But I can’t do that! My daily schedule varies too much! I’ve tried daily habits before, and they just don’t work for me!” And I gently push back. First of all, I said Supportive Habits. Nothing in there said “daily.” A weekly or a monthly or even a most-days habit can still be a Supportive Habit. But more than that, 80% done is 100% awesome. Habits don’t actually have to be all-the-time habits to still support you in the way that you need. Doing a habit 80% of the time is more than enough to allow you to get the benefit of that habit.

I have quite a few Supportive Habits that I intend to do daily, and that I think of as daily habits: exercising, using my vocal nebulizer, posting on social media each weekday, writing in my gratitude journal, spending time in prayer and meditation, hydrating well, eating healthy food, etc.. But I don't actually get them all done every single day. Sometimes life happens.

Here’s a real-world example. Just over two months ago, at the end of April (yes, April!), our washing machine and dryer both died. We bought a new set the very next day, but it was anything but a smooth process from there. The initial delivery couldn't happen because of a mix-up with the install people. The machines couldn't be redelivered because they got damaged during the first attempted install. The wrong connecting hoses were ordered, delaying yet another attempted install. The factory didn't have the right replacement ... and on and on and on. Needless to say, both my husband and I have spent a lot of time either talking to or on hold with the appliance delivery and sales departments these past few months, and we only just got the new machines successfully installed the first week of July. It was rough. (And yes, I know that plenty of people don’t have in-home laundry and that having easy laundry access is a privilege, but for better or worse, it is a privilege I am very used to, and dealing with the lack of it was a huge time suck and a major disruption to my daily and weekly schedules.)

In those months without a working washer and dryer, with the craziness of going to the laundromat and handwashing clothes and spending hours on the phone to try to get the machines fixed, my supportive daily habits took a back seat. In short, they did not always happen.

But remember: 80% done is 100% awesome. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Do what you can, even if it’s not perfect. Doing your "daily" habits most days is still fabulous, even if "most" is not actually "every." Even if it's a habit you'd like to have happen every day, a habit doesn't have to actually happen daily to still support you. Most days is still wonderful. And I did manage to do most of my daily habits on most days, and that was enough to keep me going. Especially when it comes to your Supportive Habits, doing something is always better than doing nothing. 80% done is 100% awesome.

This “progress over perfection” principle also applies when it comes to the administrative tasks in your business. I sometimes see creatives not do any marketing outreaches at all because they don’t have the time to craft the perfect email and send all of their outreach emails all at once … and so they don’t do any marketing at all, meaning they don’t have any work coming back into their business, since the consistency of the work coming into your business is equal to the consistency of marketing going out of your business. But they can’t do that marketing perfectly, so they do none.

The other area where I see this happen so often is with finances. Business finances are hard, even for business majors. I know this – my parents own an accounting firm and taught both introductory and advanced level accounting classes at universities and colleges for most of my growing up years. Our dinner table conversation often dealt with the finer points of 1099s and Schedule C’s, LLCs vs S Corps vs C Corps. But just as often, my parents would discuss the problems their accounting students were facing in the courses they were teaching, bouncing ideas off each other to figure out how to help their struggling students.

And my major takeaway as a child growing up hearing all that discussion about the problems that accounting students were having in my parents’ courses? That accounting and business finance are hard, even for people who are majoring in those subjects! This is stuff that doesn’t really come easily to anyone.

And, like I mentioned earlier in this episode, we artists and creatives have a bit of a disadvantage. Most of us when to fine art school, or maybe have a liberal arts education. Most of us never had to take, and we certainly didn’t choose to take, Accounting 101 or Intro to Business. I was lucky in that my conservatory did offer a Business of Music class as an elective, which I took, but even that class had more to do with how to format a resume and apply to young artist programs than it did with anything about how to be self-employed and run my own business.

And yet here we are, artists who are self-employed and who do own businesses that we want to support us financially and pay our bills and feed our families and get our kids through school. Here we are, forced to deal with business finances.

It’s so hard to look that bank account or that spreadsheet in the face and find the courage to tackle it. The first time you do it, you’re going to feel so overwhelmed and inadequate for the task! But remember: Quantity over quality. The more you do it, even if you do it poorly at first (or for a long while), the better you will get at it. You will learn by doing. You will improve by doing. If you wait until you can handle your finances perfectly, you will never start. You will let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Focus on progress, and do what you can. And then do what you can again. And again. And again. And eventually, you will find that you’ve got a handle on it.

And, of course, as you’re doing that administrative work your business requires of you, it does make a really big difference to get help. Finding an accountant who is experienced with creative small businesses can be a GAME CHANGER for your business. Reading books like The Money Book and Profit First, both of which I’ve talked about on this podcast before and which I’ll link in the show notes, can give you the guidance you need. And another resource you have at your disposal is that free guide I have available that I mentioned at the top of this episode, my guide to finances for creative entrepreneurs. You can that get for free by filling out the contact form on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com.

Anything that you do in the direction of positive change when it comes to the administrative side of your business, from invoicing to marketing to managing your finances, is valuable, even if it’s not everything that you want to do. Do want you can. 80% done is 100% awesome. Always always always, focus on progress and let go of perfection.

The final area of your business where I want to talk about the importance of progress, not perfection, is in your personal life. As I already mentioned when talking about your Supportive Habits, you matter immensely to your business. Your business cannot thrive if you are not thriving, and so Supportive Habits that give you what you need are absolutely vital.

But so too is it absolutely vital that you intentionally take time away from your business completely. Don’t step away from your business because you have a Supportive Habit that you have to do that your business needs; step away from your business because you as a person need that time away. There is no starving allowed here! Don’t starve yourself of the enriching life that you need to be a whole person, which, by the way, is exactly what allows you to be an excellent and innovative artist. Don’t forgo personal fulfillment just because you don’t have the time or money or whatever for the “perfect” vacation, or you aren’t able to spend the “perfect” afternoon with your partner or friend or children. Use the resources you have. Find ways to get the personal enrichment you need, and prioritize those needs. You matter. Your art is never more important than you are, and your business is never more important than you are. Even if you’re not able to take advantage of 100% of the personally enriching opportunities around you, you can probably take advantage of 80%. And that is still awesome.

In all of this, there is a beauty in the process of growing, in the process of making progress and becoming the person and the artist that you are meant to be. Life is lived in the present, not in the never-achieved perfect future. Live your life now. Savor your life now. Always do what you can now, focus on what is in front of you right now, and if it’s not perfect, who cares? It’s the best you can do right now, and that is in itself a kind of perfect. The joy of this creative entrepreneurship life that we have chosen for ourselves comes in the everyday becoming more of who we truly are, of savoring the progress and growth evident over time. The joy is in the journey.

Thank you so much for being here with me today. I hope you enjoyed this philosophical little journey through the value of progress and quantity and savoring the good and of doing the thing, even if it’s only to 80%. I hope today’s episode prompted you to think and perhaps think of some ways that you can find joy in the progress and growth you are experiencing. If you have any questions for me or if you’d like to find out more about how you can work with me, I’d love for you to visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. You can find all the details of my programs there, and that’s how you can contact me as well. As always, any ratings and reviews of this podcast are most appreciated, and don’t forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. If you know someone who you think might find today’s episode interesting or thought-provoking, please share it with them. Sharing is caring! And as always, a huge shout of gratitude goes out to my husband and audio engineer, Arturo Araya. If I sound good while you’re listening to me today, that is thanks to his audio wizardry.

In your work as a creative entrepreneur, always always always, the goal is not to be perfect; the goal is to be the very best you that you can be, today, in this very moment. Sometimes that means spending time creating. Sometimes that means spending time enjoying the Supportive Habits that enrich your creative soul. Sometimes that means working on the pesky administrative tasks of your business. And sometimes that means stepping away from your business and your work altogether to nourish your personal self. And it always means enjoying the present moment and where you are right now, while also knowing that you will strive to be better tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. If you are making progress, then you are being the very best creative entrepreneur you can be. And no one can ask more of you than that. I can’t wait to see what you create.