It’s only recently that I’ve realized how much perfectionism has stunted my growth and progress. In May, during the renewal process, I decided to check how long I’ve owned this domain. To my dismay, it’s been 20 YEARS!
With the help of the Wayback Machine, I looked back to conduct a post-mortem on where I lost my enthusiasm and passion. At the time, I was using this website as a project portfolio and blogging over at KrazyKory. From what I can pinpoint, a few things played a role in me abandoning those efforts a little over 15 years ago.
- Parent’s Divorce & College Life - During my freshman year, while on spring break, I returned home to the announcement of my parents’ divorce after 20+ years of marriage. Needless to say, I was devastated, and my world was flipped upside down. While this wasn’t the sole reason, I look back and notice it did take some of the wind out of my sails. Another factor was college coursework and the distractions of normal college life. I noticed significantly less attention being given to those websites as I approached my junior year.
- My Standards of Perfection - I wanted to create “the perfect” website without knowing what that even looked like. I can find fragments of abandoned layouts in Photoshop, sketches in notebooks, and other ideas on my hard drive that I know would never have been good enough for me to release. Even when I settled on a design, I would instantly start working on a new one. While all the design churn helped me master Photoshop, I also became an expert at creating “coming soon” pages and teasing designs.
- Development & Design Loops - The inability to settle on a design created a loop of constantly starting to code a design into a WordPress theme, stopping halfway through, then starting on a new design—rinse and repeat.
- Comparison - They say, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” While I know this to be true in other parts of my life, it’s the main reason why my designs were never good enough. Full of youth and inexperience, I was comparing my designs to those of professional designers with multiple years of development experience. I was never going to succeed with such pressure and unrealistic expectations for myself.
Incremental Development
Now that I understand the underlying issues that led to my lack of enthusiasm and passion, I feel that the incremental development model will prevent me from repeating the past. With enough years of experience and knowledge to see it in action at a professional level, I know it will offer just the right balance of progress, stability, and innovation. What this has looked like in practice so far:
- I settled on a tech stack and framework.
- I found a theme I can build on. Astro Nano is a great theme.
- I’ve customized it just enough to launch with.
- In the future, I plan on tweaking it while adding more content.
With this approach, I don’t know if I’ll answer Theseus’s Paradox, but I do know I’m considering this Day 0, even though I’ve owned the domain for over 20 years. I’m more passionate than ever to begin this journey, and I hope you’ll join me.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
―Steve Jobs