i’ve spent a lot of my life being told that perfectionism is a bad thing.
if you ask me? they’re not wrong. perfectionism is; as a matter of fact; pretty annoying.
it’s the reason why a task that should take 30 minutes somehow takes 4 hours. it’s the reason why i’ve zoomed into a design at 400% just to move something by approximately three pixels. it’s the reason why i’ve stared at two shades of beige for so long that i eventually forgot what colour beige even is.
but over the years, i’ve realised something.
perfectionism itself isn’t the problem. the problem is where you aim it.
for example, a few weeks ago i decided to build my website. yes, this website. i had absolutely no idea what i was doing.
i didn’t know what would go on the homepage. i didn’t know what would come after the homepage. i didn’t know how many sections i needed. i didn’t know how much text was too much text. (i do know this much text is in fact too much text though, but anyway, you’re the one who’s reading. xD)
all i knew was that the version in front of me wasn’t right. so i kept changing it. and changing it. and changing it.
at one point i spent four hours awake in the middle of the night doing nothing except changing colours. not redesigning the website, not creating new sections… just changing colours because something felt off.
eventually i found two versions that looked acceptable but then i realised the photographs no longer matched the website colours. excellent!
so naturally i changed all the photographs. then i looked at the result and immediately hated it because the paintings looked dull. so i reverted everything… which would have been fine if i had actually saved the colour codes.
i did not. because i am incredibly intelligent.
so there i was, reverse engineering my own website using screenshots and colour picker apps trying to recover colours that i had personally created. at this point i was basically conducting a digital archaeological excavation of my own decisions.
then came the image disaster.
my bandwidth was disappearing at an alarming rate and i had absolutely no idea why.
turns out uploading giant png files onto an art website is apparently frowned upon by the laws of physics. who knew.
so i removed more than a hundred images. watermarked them all again. re-exported them as jpegs. re-uploaded them.
and then spent an unreasonable amount of time making sure they still looked good.
because if there’s one thing perfectionism hates, it’s compression.
but we weren’t done. not even close.
the review section happened next. for normal businesses, reviews are simple: someone writes a testimonial, you paste it, done.
my reviews are screenshots of conversations; which means they need to be uploaded in the correct order; which means they absolutely refused to upload in the correct order; which meant i sat there manually rearranging them one by one while comparing them against the original edited files…
apparently my hobbies include sorting digital evidence.
then there were animations, wave effects, animation speeds, background colours, button placement, section spacing… you get it. (i don’t think u do but ok).
every tiny detail entered the arena. and every tiny detail got interrogated.
eventually the website launched. and something funny happened.
people liked it.
which was strange because by that point i had looked at it for so many hours that i could no longer tell whether it was beautiful or hideous. that’s another side effect of perfectionism. after enough time, your brain loses all objectivity and starts seeing problems that normal people would never notice.
but the biggest lesson wasn’t about websites… it was about perfectionism itself.
for years i thought perfectionism was simply a flaw: something i should get rid of, something holding me back.
now i think it’s more complicated than that.
because perfectionism is just attention: attention applied excessively.
and attention can build beautiful things when it’s aimed in the right direction.
the same trait that makes me overthink colour palettes also makes me care about packaging. it makes me care about print quality. it makes me care about customer experience.it makes me care about details that many people never notice.
sometimes that’s exhausting. sometimes it’s incredibly useful.
i still don’t think perfectionism is healthy all the time. sometimes it absolutely needs to be told to sit down and shut up.
but every now and then, when i look at something i’ve created and realise how much thought went into it, i’m grateful for it.
because maybe the goal was never to get rid of perfectionism.
maybe the goal was simply to put it to work.
and if i’m being honest, it seems to enjoy having a job. (yes you’re allowed to dm me just to say how beautiful my website came out to be in the end, and i will absolutely reply you and offer a discount).
i am serious: send a dm on my instagram
