Perfect or Finished
The introduction to my Youtube series
I’ve been trying to be perfect. You know that feeling when you think something is not good enough and you keep nibbling away at it until you feel it is right. Sooner or later you have to call a halt and say that’s it, finished. It’s often a really hard call.
It’s what I have been doing these last few days as I prepare for my Youtube series launch Where in the World?
I keep thinking this bit is too long or this bit is not clear enough. I redo the introduction until now the time has come and I have a deadline to meet. It’s my self imposed deadline but meet it I will. Not perfect, but finished.
Funny thing is, that after going live for 6 months during the pandemic lockdown in Australia, I thought I had got over the need to be perfect. I used a 10 minute time-frame as my deadline and most mornings I stuck to it. Ten minutes to create something while the camera rolled (metaphorically - I really used my iphone camera).
Most days I could pull something together half decent even when I didn’t feel like it or when the ink spilt everywhere or when I really didn’t know what I was doing (which was most days) and went with the ink flow.
Two days ago I was inspired by a pelican. So I tried to draw one and paint it with the inks. What a mess. Didn’t look anything like a pelican. So I wrote a post about mistakes and imperfection. I had so many comments about this poor pelican! I realised that people don’t want perfect. They want human and imperfect. They want to see that you are prone to bad days, mess ups and all the other ‘stuff’ that comes from being human.
So you learn to fall in love with those perfect imperfections. That pelican will always be my favourite and certainly memorable. I am reminded of a Brett Whitley painting I saw live and close up. There were smudges and finger marks and all kinds of imperfections in it. Those are the bits I remember.
So do something memorable. Make a mistake or two. There are no mistakes. They are perfect imperfections.
The imperfect pelican
