There are two basic symptoms of being in a Perfection Prison.

The difficulty of starting, and the impossibility of finishing. Lets tackle starting first, I will naturally use myself as an example, and I will use the subject of weight loss because it is popular and easy to relate to.

How to begin…

When I first decided around a year and a half ago that I wanted to lose weight, I had visions of grandeur, I was going to be totally different, sexy, hot and confident. That was what my new body was going to bring me. I was so excited I wanted it as soon as possible.

I was obsessed with the idea of doing it right. I was immediately drawn to all encompassing diet and workout plans. I wanted to do a sudden life overhaul that would bring me super fast results. I researched blogs, books, even medical journals to find this absolute (and perfect) fix.

Guess what? It doesn’t exist! It doesn’t matter how many qualified professionals guarantee that this plan is the best for you or how many people have said it worked perfectly for them. There are just as many scientists and customers (if not more) who think it is absolute crap or had horrible results.

It doesn’t actually matter what plan you pick. What matters is that you START it. Now of course I’d say, try to shy away from stranger and more extreme plans. Just find a decently reputable plan, send an email or check in with a doctor to make sure it is healthy for you and any conditions you have and just do it.

As an extra tidbit of advice, don’t find a program you WANT to be able to do, find a program you CAN do you. No one goes from a total couch potato to an absolute gym nut in one day.

Wait, it’s not quite perfect yet…

Not everyone has both of these problems, some people once they finally get around to starting on something have no difficulty finishing it. But some people suffer from the other type of Perfection Prison, the one that never lets you out!

Many of the people who end up reading this will probably be bloggers or wannabe bloggers, so I’m going to use blogging as my subject for this topic.

I mentioned in my previous post about how much I obsessed over starting a blog. But that wasn’t the only issue. I got the domain, I was signed up, I figured out somewhat of a plan, I was ready to go! I beat the Perfection Prison and started up my account and put real money down lets do this!

Yeah not quite. It didn’t seem to matter what I wrote in Word or in the WordPress post writer, it was never good enough for me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t make it perfect, it was that I just hadn’t made it perfect yet. So I just kept editing, I kept adding pictures, resizing pictures, adding new videos, re-uploading them, trying to get them to start at the perfect time, blah blah blah. I was an amateur trying to turn out professional level material from day one.

Anyone with the least bit of blogging experience can tell you that this is just impossible. You don’t even have an audience yet, let alone know what it desires from you.

You have to just let go. You have to accept that it isn’t perfect. Don’t try to convince yourself it is, you never will.

A trick way of doing this is to knowingly publish it as unfinished. Thats the great thing about a blog, you can go back and edit your posts as many times as you want. If you’re feeling self-conscious just put ‘draft’ in the name, or specifically state that the post is unfinished.

Conclusion

If you want to see success, you have to take risks. You have to accept that you can’t be perfect, but at the same time strive to be the best you can be. It’s a difficult balance to make, but damn it feels good to break out of the Perfection Prison.

The Perfection Prison is a scary thing.

Its that nagging feeling that keeps you from completing something. It can be more powerful than your desire to do whatever it is you want to do!

If you don’t know what I’m talking about then you definitely don’t suffer from this… perfection syndrome.

If you find yourself constantly thinking things like…

“I still need to lose more weight”

“This painting could never be as good as ‘X’ so why bother continuing… ”

“I’ll never be able to master this, so why bother even starting?”

Then you’re in the same boat as me. This isn’t an insecurity, its an obsession, minor or major dependent on the individual.

Before posting on this blog, I absolutely OBSESSED over not just what I was going to write about, but the theme, the colours, the font, the style, the everything!

I started dozens of ‘draft’ posts. Trying out different styles, different ways of organization, and I constantly was disappointed. Nothing was good enough. I wanted every single post to be PERFECT. I wanted each one to perfectly replicate those of ultra successful blogs.

At this point you’re either chuckling at my ridiculousness or nodding your head in understanding. It was pretty bad.

But this isn’t just about blogging, In daily life also we can feel this way, my Perfection Prison exists there too.

I’ve lost a ton of weight in the last year or so. Last Holiday season (Oh so PC), I weighed in at 215 pounds or  about 95 kg(And international too!). Now I weigh about 152 (69 kg).

You’re probably thinking, wow great job! You’ve lost so much weight, you must feel so much more confident and so much better about yourself now.

But the reality is for someone in a perfection prison, I really don’t. In fact I might actually feel worse than I did before. I think I had mostly accepted being overweight, and I wasn’t really trying to fix it, so I was okay where I was at. But once I started weight loss, I feel like its never enough. I feel like I won’t be happy until I look perfect.

Okay so I’ve talked about the problems. It kept me from blogging, it rendered my weight loss emotionally unrewarding, but how can you or I fix it?

I don’t know for sure, but I have some ideas.