As I write this article, I have 5 half-finished articles sitting in my drafts folder. I have 244 ideas for photographs sitting in an Evernote notebook. 28 ideas for new blog posts. 23 half-finished photos on my hard drive.

I’m fantastic at starting things. Not so great at finishing them.

Part of it is being inspired by an idea and then the inspiration dying out a little as something new and oh so shiny pops into my head.

But the bigger part is I’m so focused on perfection that I never get anything done. I spend too much time theorising, analysing, thinking… but not enough time doing.

It sounds so simple and obvious: you’ll never achieve something unless you work on it consistently.

Sometimes I have to ask myself why I’m so infatuated with the dream of writing the perfect article or taking the perfect photo. There’s no such thing as perfection, everything is a gradual improvement over time.

You don’t sign up to a martial arts class expecting to take down the Sensei on the first day.

The way to get better at something is by doing it, repeatedly. Everybody sucks at the start; you’re supposed to suck at the start. You have to begin somewhere.

Here’s a quote from a book called Art & Fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

So I’m making it my mission to hit that Publish button more. I’ve fully embraced the fact that means some of my posts are going to be rubbish. But in the words of Linus Pauling:

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

What things do you have sitting somewhere, half-finished? What are you putting off?