It’s my opinion (uncorroborated by any science that I know about) that people who are drawn to design tend to be perfectionists. Being a designer, and being creative, means that you have an idea in your head about how something should be, and you work on it as long and hard as you can to get it to match what’s in your head. It’s like the quote attributed to Michelangelo:
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
You’d think that wanting perfection would be a good trait in a creative person, and often it is. But perfectionism can also be detrimental to creativity.
Fear Of Failure
We all have fear of failure sometimes, but perfectionists have this fear more than most. Failure, in many cultures, for example, in the United States, is seen as a bad thing—it’s not good to fail. This is not true in all cultures. In some schools, in some cultures (for example, in some schools in France and in Asia), children learn that struggling and making mistakes are good. They’re taught that the whole class can learn from the mistakes and failures of one student.
Changing the idea of failure from a bad thing into a process often enhances creativity. There’s the famous quote attributed to Thomas Edison:
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
He purportedly said this when he was trying to find a good filament for the light bulb.
And indeed, he had tried many different types of filaments, and ways to use them that had not worked. But he didn’t consider these attempts to be failures. He just thought of them as part of an iterative process. By going through all the different possible filament materials, he believed he would eventually find the right one.
If you’re open to the idea that failure is iterative, then you can accept that you may not get the most creative idea right away, that you’re not going to solve the problem necessarily with the first idea you come up with, and that you don’t have to come up with perfect, fully formed ideas. You can get past the idea of failure. If you’re afraid of failing, then you’re going to be afraid of starting. Assume that you won’t have perfect ideas at the start, and see if you can get to the point where you think that’s OK. Turning the idea of failure into an idea of iteration is a great way to generate creative solutions.
The same applies to designing with a team. The team needs to iterate to get to a good design, too.
Takeaways
- Be on the lookout for perfectionists on your team — yourself included. You might need to get some coaching to relax and lose some fear.
- Make sure you and your team have time and cycles available to iterate. This lets you come up with ideas and try them out, discarding them until you get to the idea or solution that fits best.
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