Is Perfectionism Just Procrastination in Disguise? | Jon Youshaei | TED

I have a confession.

As a YouTuber, I make videos for a living,

yet I still get severe anxiety every time I go to hit the upload button

to post my next video.

My desktop looks like this.

I finish my video and I go to save it as "FINAL."

But then I notice that I could trim off a few parts of it

and make it even better.

So I resave that file as "FINAL_FINAL."

But then I'm like, wait, I can make the audio a bit better.

I can make the color more saturated. Let me resave it as "FINAL_BUT_ACTUALLY."

(Laughter)

And then I repeat this process 29 more times

until I save 29 more versions of that same damn video.

until sometimes I honestly still don't upload it

because it's still not good enough.

My obsession with perfection got so bad that in my first year on YouTube,

I only uploaded six videos.

But hey, as they say, quality over quantity, right?

What started to bring me out of my spiral was something I remembered

during my eight years working at YouTube and Instagram,

where I met many creators and artists before trying to become one myself.

And specifically one person who completely changed my perspective

on how creativity actually works.

And that one person is none other than the one and only James Corden.

Yeah, the guy from "Cats."

(Laughter)

You see, James did something so profound and different

with his late night show and YouTube channel

that he often doesn't get enough credit for it.

For years, late night hosts had primarily structured their shows

around two formats, two segments:

monologues and interviews.

But Corden came along and he's like, you know what?

I'm going to experiment with 109 different formats,

from Carpool Karaoke to Crosswalk the Musical to Riff-Off,

to the point where he uploaded a staggering 5,700 videos,

and he soon surpassed

nearly all the other late night shows in subscribers

despite starting from way behind.

And while many of us may remember Corden

for his popular formats, like Carpool Karaoke,

which has now totaled over one billion views,

we don’t even talk about and forget about the many, many flops he’s had.

Like formats like Musical Chers,

an actual format where he played musical chairs with Cher impersonators.

(Laughter)

That happened.

And all of this got me thinking

that maybe I should be creating more like Corden.

Maybe I should be prioritizing publishing my work

instead of just perfecting it, because you never know what will take off.

And then it really hit home

when I started seeing this trend across different artists,

innovators and entrepreneurs throughout time.

And I came across perhaps the biggest badass in history,

Wolfgang Amadeus I'm-going-to-kick-everybody's-ass Mozart.

Because Mozart wasn’t the masterpiece-making machine

that history makes him seem to be.

No. Some of his early critics called his music far too noisy.

But Wolfie just brushed that dirt off his shoulder,

and he proceeded to make over 600 compositions in his career

before dying at age 35,

which was far, far more than his peers,

who only averaged 150 compositions despite living way longer.

That was Mozart's method.

He was obsessed about quantity as much as quality.

He was committed to creating countless compositions

that we have now forgotten

to get the just small handful of masterpieces we now remember.

But let's talk about another example.

How about the guy who created this creepy cyborg doll?

He got a ton of public ridicule, but by the way,

he’s also the guy who invented 1,092 other inventions,

including a little thing called the light bulb.

So yeah, Thomas Edison didn't even have the best light bulb moments,

yet he persisted past his imperfections and bad ideas, too.

Or how about Monet, the legendary artist?

Most people don’t know that he created over 2,000 works of art in his career.

But here's what crushes my soul about Monet.

Because that number should be way higher.

You see, Monet was such a perfectionist

that one time he worked on a set of paintings

for over three years.

Until at the last moment,

when they were supposed to debut the paintings in Paris,

he saw slight imperfections in the corners,

so he took out a butcher knife

and he slashed through every single painting he made.

Because it wasn’t perfect enough for him.

But curators and scholars today say that he destroyed

over 3.4 million dollars worth of art that night,

just because it wasn't perfect enough.

Which got me thinking,

how many of us are too much like Monet instead of Mozart, Edison or even Corden?

How many of us slash our work at the last second

instead of just shipping it?

And how many of us have unknowingly left masterpieces on the floor

because we got too in our heads?

For me, it was only once I started shifting my mindset from Monet to Mozart

that I saw a real change in my career as a creator.

That after posting an embarrassing six videos in my first year,

we went on to post 173 videos that got over 300 million views,

and somehow our channel became one of the fastest-growing on YouTube.

And yes, we had tons of flops, even more than ever.

But I now realize that cringing at your past work is proof of progress.

And sometimes perfectionism is just procrastination in disguise.

And a lot of our most popular videos were actually our most imperfect.

We had videos with not the best coloring, not the best lighting, not the best audio.

Some shots were blurry, yet they still got millions of views.

So next time you're working on your next big idea,

I beg of you, for the love of God, put down your knife.

Be Mozart, not Monet.

Every artist, every entrepreneur,

anybody who's ever pushed the envelope even a millimeter,

has experienced anxiety.

You're going to have flops.

You're going to have critics.

But I hope no matter what, that you keep creating,

you keep putting stuff out there.

Because the only thing worse than something imperfect

is something that doesn't exist.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)