Kicks in the butt every now and again are pretty important. I had three in the last two days.
First one was finally finishing (devouring, rather) the Pastry School by photographer Alicia Caine, which finally made me stop obsessing about releasing my photography pricing and just get on with it and put it up there on my website. A very good but gentle kick in the butt it was. It made me realise that it’s okay to change prices once in a while, or maybe even quite often. That if I don’t try this pricing out I will never know whether it’s right or not, and won’t be able to grow.
The second one came yesterday, over a rather unpleasant house-buying drama. I won’t go into too much detail, but due to lack of communication between all parties (myself included, but I blame my solicitor and the estate agents more than others) we have had over 2 weeks delay in the buying process, an unhappy vendor on the brink of withdrawing from the sale, and me realising that if I don’t start acting (and kicking somebody else’s ass, too) we might just loose the house it took us a year to find. A very useful kick in the butt, but I’d rather I didn’t get it.
The last kick up the backside came today, as I was on the train home and reading Ali Hale’s of Aliventures post on being consistent. The post is quite insightful and, no doubt, useful, but it wasn’t the consistency bit of it that got me moving. It was the last paragraph about people quitting their diets because they are too perfectionist:
Many dieters feel that if they’re not 100% consistent, they might as well give up. In fact, one large meal or one day of over-indulgence isn’t what causes 95% of diets to fail … it’s the perfectionist attitude which says, “I’ve failed, I might as well give up now.”
And it finally hit me: I realised than that I am too bloody perfectionist when I don’t really need to be. I will obsess with something for very long, and then decide it’s not quite right, and will delay finishing it and releasing it to the world for days and weeks… until it finally becomes irrelevant. Same with writing, same with editing photographs.
I mean, I know I am perfectionist, and I know it’s not necessarily a good thing, but you know how it happens when you needed just that final drop for something to dawn on you?
I have got 3 draft blog posts saved for this blog. I couldn’t post them because I felt they were not quite there yet, not quite perfect for me to release them to my huge audience (hello you four two, by the way!). I don’t post on my photography blog often enough: I didn’t have any new photography sessions recently, and I don’t want to post the old stuff… so I don’t post anything.
And that’s not helping anyone. It’s not helping me, and it not helping others to find me.
So I am thankful for those three. And I am sure as hell I will need more to truly progress. But guess what? I know I’ll handle it! 
