I refuse to call myself a “perfectionist.” Besides the fact that Jung and I shun labels for people in our own speech and guide our daughters to avoid using them as well, I also know that I am perfectly capable of declaring my work to be “good enough” when it’s appropriate. This is why, when I first decided to try the Tumblr service, I named my blog, “Done is Good” as a play on the expression, “Done is better than good.” Still, I often feel resistance early in the process of creating something. I think somewhere inside me I believe that committing something to the physical world, whether it be on the screen or on paper, is somehow a very serious act. That is the time when my perfectionism rears it’s head most often. I try to create the perfect beginning in my head but I become paralyzed, not knowing where to start.

I felt relief when my composition instructor told us that he had a similar problem when he was a less experienced composer but he found a solution. He would go ahead and make himself write a draft, knowing full well that it was all wrong. What he discovered is that once he had a draft, then he had something to fix. It was often difficult for him to come up with the right music for the scene while sitting and thinking about it, but putting some notes on the page and then listening to them gave him a sense of which direction to go in to get the sound he was looking for. Avoiding any pretense that anything from the draft was useable allowed him to move forward quickly. In a sense the draft gave him his bearings and helped him identify where he was on the musical map. Only then could he know what direction to go in to get to his desired destination.

Now I have become more aware of the times when I am attempting to create the perfect beginning in my head before writing a composition or a blog post. When I become conscious of my hesitation, I force myself to leap out into a draft just to get something on the page. The first sentence of this post, for instance, ended up being pushed further and further down the page as I wrote until finally I deleted it because it had become superfluous. However, without that first, now deleted sentence, this post would not exist. Allowing myself to not worry about the quality of what I am creating at first, gets me past my initial resistance and helps to point me in the right direction.

So go ahead and create something—anything! The value of what you create is not in it’s quality, but in its ability to tell you where you are and where you need to go. That’s the secret message of the first draft and there is no substitute!