Hey there, Marissa here. Let me be totally honest with you. I am a recovering perfectionist. And for those of you that have been labeled or perhaps you have self-diagnosed yourself as a perfectionist, this podcast episode might be interesting to you. The interesting thing about perfectionism is that it's very negative. It's something that is counterproductive, something that's unhealthy, creates a lot of anxiety. However, when you have skill sets that could resemble perfectionism, that's another thing. I'm also a very meticulous and detail-oriented person. That doesn't necessarily mean perfectionism. It means that those are skills that are baked into me. And I need to be able to assess within myself when I'm being perfectionist or when I'm actually exercising those skill sets that will help me produce something that has quality. That's exactly what we're going to talk about today in episode 16: why done is better than perfect is not always the right mindset for online entrepreneurs. So stay tuned. Welcome. I'm Marissa Shatterick, host of the Resilient Faith Online Show. I'm a digital strategist and certified copywriter, but more importantly, a woman of faith. In this podcast, you'll find a biblical perspective to the external and internal challenges we face as online content creators. Join me for some inspiration and practical tips as we let our faith shape our work to create positive change online. To connect with our private Facebook group of faith-based online entrepreneurs, go to MarissaShabert.com forward slash faith. Hello, hello, how are you doing today? So glad to be here. Marissa here with a very special podcast episode. We're going to be talking about the phrase, done is better than perfect. And if you've been in the online space for any length of time, you have probably heard that in a training. You've heard it from speakers, you've heard it on YouTube, you've heard it probably across the board, and maybe I've even said it a time or two. It seems like it's a phrase that we've all adopted, done is better than perfect. Done is better than perfect. But I started thinking about this, and I alluded to this earlier, that I have skill sets that tend to resemble perfectionism, but they're not necessarily indications of a perfectionist. I used to be one, I'm a recovering one, and I'm very mindful and intentional to make sure that all of the things that I choose to do each day, moment by moment, are moving me forward in a healthy manner rather than a counterproductive or unhealthy manner. And that's something that we all have to take responsibility for. So I don't know if you're a perfectionist. Perhaps you've been labeled perfectionist because you have some skill sets that might resemble perfectionism. Now there are some professions that people could easily call them perfectionists, but it's well accepted. And I think it's more their skill set of being meticulous and detail-oriented. For example, would you want someone that's a surgeon just have that philosophy of done is better than perfect? I don't think so. What about a pharmacist who's mixing some type of medication? Done is better than perfect. No, I don't think so. Or an accountant, a CPA that you have. You want them to be meticulous and detail oriented. So you want someone that's going to have a quality of excellence or a pilot on a flight that you're taking. Oh my gosh, you would want someone that is very meticulous and detail oriented. And we could go down the line of different professions that these qualities come into play, that they are needed, accepted, and desired. And when we think of the online world, when we're an online entrepreneur, sometimes the done is better than perfect comes into play. And I think it's for different reasons. And we're going to talk about this. Now, I'm not at all saying pursue perfection. No matter how well we try to pursue excellence, it will never be perfect. Only God is perfect, right? Only God is perfect. But we can strive to do things with excellence because the people that we serve, the audience that we serve, the customers that we serve, they don't deserve mediocrity. They don't deserve less than our best. We need to produce our best for them. But I think we need to really clarify the two things, the excellence and perfectionism. When it falls into one, that's kind of the dark side of perfectionism, where it's unhealthy and we can tell we have anxiety. Or when it's not perfectionism and it's excellent, when we're excited and we're proud of the work. Yes, I use the word proud. We're proud of the work that we produce because we've done it to the best of our ability. Is it perfect? No, it's not. But we've done everything we can to deliver the best that we can because that, my friend, is what people deserve. They deserve the best that we have to offer. So I started thinking about this. And when you think of excellence, if you don't pursue excellence, what would happen? If we adopted that phrase, done is better than perfect, and we think, ah, get enough. You know, I'll just hit publish. Good enough. And for a while, I'll have to say, for a while, I kind of was influenced by that phrase. I know that some of these seven points that I'm going to touch on, I've suffered from these. So I want to make sure that I think there's different reasons. Sometimes we can get overwhelmed. Sometimes we don't plan enough time for what we're trying to launch. I see that so much with copy clients when I say, well, when do you need this buy or what's your launch date? It's usually like in a week or two weeks. It's always like, I need it right away. They don't plan it out with enough time to be able to get all the pieces in place. And even when we have listed out all the pieces in place and we have a list of things, the tasks that need to get done, there's always the unexpected. So if you think something is going to take two weeks, you need to triple that and consider six weeks. If you think it's going to take a month, give yourself a quarter. Give yourself enough space to do it well, to proofread it, to record the videos, whatever it is you need to do and do it well. That was the same way when I launched this podcast. I gave myself three months, a whole quarter to get everything in place, to purchase my broadcaster, to get my sound, my background sound, to record the intro, the outro, to create where the show notes were going to go on the website, to pick the host where it was going to host it, to figure out where I was going to promote it. All of those things take time, right? Recording one thing can take 15, 20 minutes, but all the other pieces take a while. So if we don't pursue excellence because we're not giving ourselves enough time, here's what can happen. I listed seven things. The first one is pretty obvious. You have a poor outcome, that what you produce is not the best. The second is you can't take it back. Once you hit publish and it's on the internet, and especially if it's on your website, it's there. It's there to stay, right? You can't take it back. Number three, you can improve it. You can improve the process. And a lot of times you hear the word tweaking and improving things. You've also lost the opportunity of that first impression. There's power in that. When people first land on your website, there's a first impression, and you can't get that back. You can't get a second first impression. They may never return. So you may lose the power of that first impression. Number four is you've assumed your audience is ready and willing to accept mediocrity. There's a lot of competition out there. We need to produce our best and represent ourselves in a professional way because there's a lot of competition out there, and we can't assume that our audience is going to be okay with good enough. The fifth one is you've compromised creativity and innovation. If you're not always looking, especially in the planning stage, I'm not saying we're always planning. There's a time to plan, there's a time to create, there's a time to execute. But when you don't pursue excellence, you compromise that creativity and innovation of doing it better and doing it different and finding how you can serve your audience better. And if you say it's good enough, then you lose that because you're not really expanding the imagination to what possibly could be in the future. The sixth is the brand quality could suffer as well. You might be labeled as not A list, but maybe a the B list or the C list. And so you want to make sure that everything that you create is represented well. The last one is in the long run, it's going to cost you more time and it's going to cost you more resources. Because if you don't do it right the first time, you're going to have to redo it. You're going to have to use more resources. Now, granted, when you're doing something like this, there's always room for improvement, right? No matter how much we pursue excellence, we're not going to get it perfect. Say you did a webinar three years ago and you were just starting out and you were nervous and you didn't know how to be on camera and it wasn't great. And now three years later, you've got some experience under your belt, you know how to do them, and you're producing some pretty good webinars. You're going to probably produce it and execute it live a few times and see how it converts and see how your market responds and see maybe what you left out or what you need to add before you put it on autopilot. So you're pursuing excellence in this webinar. You're doing it, but then you see where it could be better and you're going to improve it before you put it on autopilot. Autopilot means an automated system where the webinar plays automatically for people and then you don't have to show up live. So you don't want to do that and just say, well, good enough the first time you do the webinar if it's not good enough, if it could stand some improvement and if the conversion's not good enough, why would you just say done is better than perfect and then process that and put it in an automated system and run ads to it and do all of that? It's going to cost you more time and resources and it's going to cost you money in ads. So what you're trying to realize is this done is better than perfect, is that it can be a productivity issue more than perfectionism, trying to avoid perfectionism. I think everything that I searched on the internet related to that phrase, they were trying to really help people not to lean toward perfectionism. But I think we've adopted it for so long and for so many years because we hear it over and over again that it's starting to create this mediocrity and we don't want to do that. The intent of all the articles I've seen with that phrase is to avoid perfectionism, but it doesn't mean we can just be lazy or complacent or just say good enough because we didn't give ourselves enough margin or time and we're running up a deadline that we're just gonna shoot it out and it's not the best that it can be. Now I looked on the internet to see where did this phrase come from in the first place? Where did it start? Who said this? And all the results that I got, it seemed like it connected to a book that was written in 2013 by a billionaire and COO of Facebook, Cheryl Sandberg. She published this book titled Lean In. And it was all about helping women be able to achieve and have higher positions in the corporate world. And it really wasn't about perfectionism at all. It was about helping women excel. The reason why they wrote the book was because she had done a TED talk that was very, very successful in 2010. So, like three years earlier, she had done this TED Talk, Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders. And this TED Talk just blew up and went viral, and there's still over three million views on it. And because of this TED talk, she ended up writing this book, but it was all about women in corporate leadership. It wasn't about perfectionism. And there was this phrase in that book that's coined, and you can see it on Goodreads and so forth, that it says done is better than perfect. I don't know what she was referring to or the context of it because I didn't read the book, but it was interesting to see that it was this COO of Facebook that originally had this in this book. You know, we want to perform at a high level of excellence and deliver quality work, but that doesn't always mean it's perfectionism. I think we need to really separate the two, and only you know whether it is or not. You know how you're feeling inside, in your heart, in your soul. You know if you're trying to overcome insecurities or fears, and that's why you're doing this whole perfectionism thing. You know, you know what is triggering that, and you know if it's just because you want to deliver quality work. Only you can decide that. Nobody can label you or decide for you. So I did a little further research and uh Harvard Business Review, they had interviewed some experts and they published this article, How to Manage Your Perfectionism. And in there, uh, there was a former clinical psychologist, Alice Boyce, who shared perfectionists have a tendency to ruminate thinking about a problem without ever coming to a solution. And I'm sure you've heard that. There's been the buzz, overthinking, just overthinking the situation and mulling over every scenario, even when you're at a point of creating and executing and maybe even marketing, you're still agonizing over things. You're trying to make things a little tighter, a little better, all within that tight time that you have to produce it because of fear, not because of excellence, because of fear. And so, as I continued to uh look at this particular article, she also said that reading in your professionistic propensities is not as hard as it sounds. It's all about rechanneling a strength of yours rather than aiming for a lower goal. Your aim is to take some of the pressure off of yourself. I thought that was interesting. Rechanneling your strength rather than lowering your goal. In other words, look at the big picture and decide where is your strength going? Is it going toward fear and anxiety? Is it really something that's productive for you or is it counterproductive? It's rechanneling the strength, the energy you're putting out. Where is it going? Toward the dark side or toward the light. Well, I'm going to coin Star Wars a little bit because I'm going to talk about Disney here in just a second. But they also had Matt Plummer, who's the founder of Zervana. It's an online coaching service that helps workers become more productive. He said that a lot of perfectionist tendencies are rooted in fear and insecurity. So there you go. And he said to look, look at the big picture and the cost and time overall. In other words, is it worth spending the extra hour, five hours on something, depending on the type of result it's supposed to produce? In other words, is it worth tweaking the webinar, for example, and making it better each time? Well, if you're gonna put it on autopilot, it sure is worth the time because once it goes on autopilot, you can run that thing over and over again. And then you're gonna probably run Facebook ads to invite people to that automated webinar. And the automated webinar, you don't have to show up live. It's already recorded. You've already improved it as best as you can. So it is worth the cost and the time to spend in improving it. An email you're creating, is it worth your time to spend five hours on one email? Probably not. He was trying to make the point that look at the big picture and consider, you know, the actual outcome of it. Is it worth investing in this particular thing for this amount of time? Is it going to bring me a type of ROI, a return on my personal investment of time and talent and experience? So you can ask yourselves questions like, um, am I using my time wisely? Am I being productive? He recommends focusing on maximizing the impact of your work. Will it have impact on your work? If it's going to have impact, like that webinar I gave you as an example, then maybe it is worth tweaking it and making it better and stronger each time you provide it live before you put it on autopilot. In this article, it came down to a fine line of productivity issues. Maybe not giving yourself enough time, enough margin to produce work and you're up against a deadline and you figure, good enough, I'm just gonna send it out. And it also suggested to have a checklist so you can tick off the items on your list and call it done once it's done. You know, have a calendar and block out the days for the planning and the creating and the marketing and the follow-up and all of that and space it out so you can fit the other things that you have to do during the week, whether you have one-on-one coaching clients or group coaching or a mastermind, or if you do done for you service work, you want to make sure that you can give those things attention as well. I like to do things in quarterly goals because it gives me the margin that I need to be able to give everything the time that it deserves. And when you're talking about customers and clients, you want to pursue excellence and bring the best that you can bring. I recently read Robert Iger's book, The Ride of a Lifetime, Lessons Learned from 15 years as CEO of Walt Disney Company. He became CEO of Walt Disney Company in 2005. And in 2005, Disney was not in a good place. They had not produced some good films. There was, it was shaky. It was shaky. And the little description on Amazon when I bought the book says this Robert Iger became CEO of the Walt Disney Company in 2005 during a difficult time. Competition was more intense than ever, and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company's history. So he had a lot on his plate when he became CEO. And if you think about it, during the time that he was CEO, they had the acquisition with Pixar, then they acquired Marvel, then they acquired Star Wars, and then they finally tied everything up where we now have the Disney app with all those films. And that literally gave them international market. So his vision really came down to three things. The first was to recommit to the concept that quality matters. Quality matters. They tried cutting corners because of budget and so forth in years prior. It didn't work. It didn't enamor the fans. The second was to embrace technology instead of fighting it. And the third is to think bigger. It's not good enough yet. We can improve this. How can we improve it? How we can make it better? How can we implement technology? How can we implement all the resources in a in just a changing world, always innovating, always being creative? And that's what turned Disney around into a strong brand in an international market. So innovation and creativity, saying good enough or done is better than perfect is not going to get us there. It's not going to challenge us to do that. But again, we're not talking about perfectionism. We're talking about leadership concepts here and being more productive with our time and always thinking of our market, how we can serve them with excellence because they deserve excellence. So when I was looking at this, I thought, okay, I did a little research here. What does the Bible say about all this, right? And I love this scripture in Colossians. It's Colossians, uh, let me find it here real quick. Colossians 3, 23. It says, work willingly at whatever you do, whatever you do, as though you are working for the Lord rather than for people. So in that scripture itself, it says, whatever you're doing, doesn't matter what it is, your personal life, your business life, whatever you do, that includes everything, all labor of any kind, whatever you do, do it as if you're working for the Lord. He's the CEO, he's the boss. Rather than people, what would your work look like? What would it look like? How would it transform? It doesn't mean you have to be perfect. You can pursue excellence and do it with the best of your ability. And maybe in five years, the best of your ability is gonna be 10 times better than what you produce today. That's okay. Today you're producing your best. Pursue excellence. Perfect doesn't mean perfect, it means you've done your work with excellence. That TED talk I referred to earlier that was in 2010. She had mentioned in there, uh Cheryl Sandberg, that she was encouraging women to take up higher leadership roles in corporate. And she had said, negotiate for your success. Don't lean back, lean in. And in this TED Talk, she was encouraging them that a lot of women don't negotiate for their success, but men do. But here's the thing: the best way that you can negotiate for your online success in a competitive market is to pursue excellence. Pursue excellence, and that's gonna help you stand out. When I think of online entrepreneurs and I think of people like Michael Hyatt, and I think of people like Amy Porterfield, Ryan Levesque, oh my goodness, the quality of their work is excellent. It is excellent. They stand out and they're all doing very, very well. They are pursuing excellence and they are reaping the rewards of it, not perfectionism, excellence. So I hope this encouraged you today that you don't need to pursue perfectionism. And if you're someone that has those types of skills where you're very meticulate and you are very detail-oriented and you have some of those gifts and talents, God gave you those gifts and talents. Use those gifts and talents. But when it's rooted in fear, when it's rooted in insecurity, that's when you should set the alarm bells and be careful of that. So if you have any comments or if you have a question, I would love to give you a shout out. In the show notes, you'll see a little button where you can record a 90-second voicemail message to me. And I would love if you give your name and your website, love to give you a shout-out and ask your question or give your comment, and we'll broadcast it here on the podcast. Until next time, I hope you take care and we'll see you soon. Bye-bye. If you found this podcast helpful, then subscribe from wherever you're listening today so you never miss an episode. Every subscription, review, or rating means so much to me. So keep them coming and share this with a friend. For more free content, go to marissashadrick.com and remember keep cultivating resilient faith online to create positive change in the world.