Quick experiments

Hey there, and Happy Sunday!

You may already know this, and maybe you can relate, but I can be a bit of a perfectionist.

It’s very difficult for me to release work into the world if it feels like I could have done it a little better. I’ve had the (completely wrong and unhelpful) belief my entire life that what I produce is a reflection of my self-worth. So releasing “bad” stuff is really hard for me.

The problem with perfectionism is that when I let it take control, then I release very little into the world. I will just sit on ideas forever and noodle them until they’re perfect. Of course, there’s always something that can be improved so they never see the light of day.

When it came to my new shop, I was determined to not let this happen.

This month I have a lot of traveling going on, but I really wanted to release the shop into the world before I headed out on all my trips. That meant that I had about 6 working days to build the whole thing and get it out into the world.

So I decided to approach my shop like a quick experiment. I was going to create the most basic thing I needed in order to ship the shop into the world. And then, like a scientist, I would observe how it’s doing and slowly iterate on it over time.

And that’s exactly what I did!

I spent about 3 days building the actual store, and then two days putting together a basic marketing strategy for the month of April that can hum along in the background even while I’m on vacation.

Constricting myself to just 3 days forced me to calm down my perfectionist brain that wanted to launch a masterpiece, and instead focus on what was absolutely essential.

It feels a little scary and vulnerable to work in this way, but now that I have a foundation, the next steps feel much easier and more clear. I have a thing that’s functioning and I can see how it does and make tiny tweaks over time.

Anyway, this was a bit of a rambly letter, but the point I’m trying to make is done is better than perfect.

Maybe you’ve been sitting on a project or idea for a while and you’re too afraid to publish it. But publishing isn’t the end-all-be-all.

You can always come back to a project and continue to improve it over time. But you have to get it out there and see how it does in order to know what actually needs to be improved.

Just do the damn thing!

Talk to you next week,

~Rachel

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