I’d like to welcome you to another one of my bite size bestseller boot camp training videos. These ones are all about the four traits of successful speakers who have published their own book. My second point in this sequence is all about “good enough is ok”. I speak here as a perfectionist. I find it very hard not to constantly tweak and refine and fiddle. I really do. I have to rein it in a lot, otherwise I would never finish anything.
You have to just fix the issues in the book. It could have twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty thousand words in it. You’re always going to want to change one word for another. You’re always going to want to change the sequence of some bullets in a list, oh it would make it bit more logical if I just swap point two with point five and all those little things. I do it myself. I know a lot of other people do.
It really slows getting a book finished and the chances are nobody else is going to notice because perfectionists are so much more critical of themselves than anybody else would ever be looking at their material. It really isn’t helpful. Fix genuine problems and as quickly as possible too. Avoid this tendency to tweak because as soon as you start tweaking you’ll want to tweak something else. Then when you want to tweak that, you’ll want to tweak a few other things.
Then when you’ve tweak a few more things you’ll think perhaps that will have a knock on effect on quite a few other aspects of the book. It just turns into a big whirling mess of edits. It’s just so destroying so don’t do that. Just focus on making it good enough, good enough is fine.
Perfectionism in my experience as well can also be a means of procrastination and a lack of confidence. You can constantly want to tweak the book so nobody has to see it. Nobody can scrutinize you, nobody can judge you and nobody can give you a bad review if your book doesn’t exist yet for sale. I think some people hide behind perfectionism when really all they need to do is just launch the book so just be careful of that. That ends this short little video.
