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You know the expression, good enough is good enough? I see the merit in this for some areas of life – when I’m cleaning and can’t move the couch by myself so I just vacuum around it? Good enough is good enough. But when putting together content you don’t just want it to be good. The internet is full of good content; it’s on page 7 of Google – where you never bother to look. Because all of the amazing stuff is on pages 1-6 so you never quite get that far.

When you’re scaling it’s not enough to be good. You have to be fan-fricking-tastic to stand out. Your Instagram? It doesn’t just need to be on brand. It needs to pack such a fabulous punch that followers engage with you. It’s so easy – and I know because I do this often – to just keep scrolling through your feed. There is plenty of content that I like, but on my personal account I tend to only like friends’ posts, despite following hundreds of brands, bloggers and individuals of note.

This perceived pressure of perfection – because let’s face it, there aren’t all that many rules when it comes to online content (exposed nipples aside) – can be a real time suck. Last week, I was working on a video invite for a preview event we’re hosting this week. The bones of it were there, we had some existing video content to integrate and I had the rough email copy to work from. A task that I assumed, regardless of my iMovie skills, would take an hour or two to draft while I was waiting for an editable version of the existing video content. As time moved closer to midnight and it felt increasingly more likely I would soon turn into a pumpkin if I didn’t get the darn thing done, I was able to shoot through a low res copy for review.

Why the delay? The pressure of perfection. I didn’t want to slap a few slides and transitions together and call it done. Call it good. Part of the pressure extends beyond the physical content to not wanting to let people down and a strong desire to deliver above expectation. I started five projects in iMovie, scrapping each one I knew wasn’t going to hit the mark. I’m a logistics person and while I think  we all have sparks of creativity within us, it’s not at my core. It takes me time (read: hours) to get the idea together. In fact, I went back to a blank piece of paper and a marker and drew each part. And I was right, once I had a concept I knew was better than good it took about an hour to put the draft together. Polonius to Hamlet said it best, though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.

Embrace your madness, your methods, your pressures. And remember that sometimes, good enough really is good enough.

X JN