Why Perfection Makes You A Poor Photographer

“I’ve been working on my website for months now. It took me months to choose the right system to design it on, and I’ve had to go back through all of my images, finding the perfect ones to include in my gallery. We’re almost finished with it now, but it’s still not quite the way I wanted it to look. I’m not sure how many people I’ll tell about it, because it truly isn’t up to my standards.”

Do you see yourself in the above statements? Or how about:

“I’ve been shooting for years now, and love the idea of building a business. I’ve created my business cards, and have been planning for quite awhile. But I’m just not sure what to do next. I want to make sure everything is in order before I find my first client. I don’t want to give the appearance my photography isn’t up to par, so I’d rather wait and make sure everything is right before I start bringing in clients.”

Yep, both of the above examples are a form of perfectionism – something I hear quite a bit in start up businesses.

Perfectionism is the refusal to accept any standard short of perfection. It’s the tendency for being displeased with anything that is not perfect or does not meet extremely high standards.

Unfortunately, those standards are always self-evaluated, and determined through your own mindset and opinions.

Being a perfectionist may sound good in theory – who wouldn’t want a business set with high standards? But in reality, perfectionism does more harm then good because it puts us into a state of paralysis that reduces “action”.

In a report on perfectionism, psychologist J Clayton Lafferty PhD said it best:

Perfectionism has nothing to do with actually trying to perfect anything. It is about illusion, the desire to look good.

And while he was talking about perfectionism in corporate America, the same holds true throughout small business as well.

Small businesses work because they are willing to take action, and move forward with a new idea to test and see how well the market likes the idea. Then they tweak, and tweak, and tweak, until they get it right. [Read more...]