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 noticed that I could trim off a few parts of it and make it even better so I resaved that file as final final but then I'm like wait wait wait I can make the audio a bit better I could make the color more saturated let

me resave it as final but actually 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 remember 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 Cordon yeah the guy from cats 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 cording came along and he's like you know what I'm going to experiment with 109 different formats from

carpool karaoke to crosswalk 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 recording for his popular formats like cpool karaoke which has now total over 1 billion views we don't even talk about and forget about the many many flops he's had like formats like musical shares an actual format where he played musical chairs with share impersonators that happened and all this got me thinking that maybe I

should be creating more like cordin maybe I should be prioritizing publishing my work instead of just perfecting it cuz 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 Wolf Gang 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 composition 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 did2 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 Monae 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 Monae because that number should be way higher you see Monae was such a perfectionist that one time he worked on a set of paintings for over 3 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 worth of art that night just cuz it wasn't perfect enough which got me thinking how many of us are too much like Monae instead of Mozart Edison or even Cordon 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 two in our heads for me it was only once I started shifting my mindset from Monae 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 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 Monae every artist every entrepreneur anybody who's ever pushed 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