Podcast

Episode 501: Doing Bad Work So You Can Get Good

Episode 165: 5 Practical Tips To Stop Being A People Pleaser

Today, I want to make a case for doing bad work. As a perfectionist, I know this is not something you want to do. You want to do only your best work and have it reflect what you are capable of. But if you aren’t willing to do bad work, you will never get good. 

It’s essential to understand this concept as a perfectionist entrepreneur. I explain the concept in this episode, including sharing some examples from my own experiences with my business. I also discuss what happens when you do bad work and how you can support yourself in learning this new approach.

If you find you’re having a hard time starting and finishing things, this episode is for you.

Find the full episode transcript and show notes at samlaurabrown.com/episode501.

What To Do Next

If you’re ready to get out of your own way in your business, you want to join my program Perfectionists Getting Shit Done. Click here to find out more about the program and join the waitlist today: samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Hi, and welcome to another episode of The Perfectionism Project, a podcast full of perfectionism advice for entrepreneurs. My name is Sam Laura Brown. I help entrepreneurs release their perfectionism handbrake so they can get out of their own way and build a fulfilling and profitable business. I’m the founder of the Perfectionists Getting Shit Done group coaching program, which is otherwise known as PGSD. And for even more perfectionism advice to help you with your business, you can follow me on Instagram @perfectionismproject.

Sam Laura Brown – (Start of episode)

Today, I just wanna make a case for doing bad work. As a perfectionist, I know this is not something you wanna do. You don’t wanna do bad work. You wanna do your best work. You want it to reflect what you’re capable of, how smart you are, how much potential you have.

You wanna get it right. You wanna do it perfect. You wanna make a great first impression. You don’t wanna make a mistake. You don’t wanna fail.

I get it. You want to do good work. You don’t wanna do bad work. But if you aren’t willing to do bad work, you will never get good. So this example sorry, this podcast episode is a perfect example of this concept. And it’s kinda why I wanted to record it because I didn’t wanna record the episode today. I’ve recorded a few. This is the 3rd one I’m recording, but I didn’t wanna record the episode. I had a lot of resistance, just perfectionism in general.

I don’t know what to say. I’m not feeling really clear about things. Just like my brain just wanting to not because it’s vulnerable to put out a podcast episode. Every time I’m doing that, I’m having to experience my own skill level, my own perception of myself, my own thoughts about myself. I’m imagining the reaction that I never even get to really see, especially with the podcast.

There are no likes. There are no comments. It’s really all in my imagination. But when I’m actually doing the work, I have to experience things that I don’t have to experience when I’m not doing the work, when I’m thinking about it, when I’m resisting it, when I’m contemplating it, when I’m avoiding it. I get to avoid certain feelings or, like, experiencing myself in a certain way that might not match up with the identity I have of myself.

So my brain wants to avoid doing work in general, but especially doing bad work. And what I have done to build my business is let myself do bad work. That has been my secret. That has been how I’ve been able to overcome the perfectionism that was crippling me and debilitating me is that I have when I look at how I built my business, what I have done is I have created safety to do bad work so that I could get good so that I could actually develop the skills. Because without a willingness to do bad work, I either wasn’t doing the work and avoiding or I was trying to do it perfectly and I was practising the wrong thing.

I was practising trying to say it right. I was practising trying to have this perfect formula or to not make a mistake versus practicing teaching, coaching, selling, marketing. So doing bad work is how you get good. And with the recent PGSD launch we did, one of my mantras because I wrote so many new emails that we sent out during the launch. And my brain, like, it just especially during a launch when so to be clear, that’s a time that enrollment for my program, perfectionist getting shit done, is open.

It’s open for 1 week. So my brain loves to go to, like, this has to be perfect. All the episodes have to be perfect. This kind of like all or nothing mentality of any single piece could make or break the entire launch. Like, every little email, every podcast episode, every post could make or break it, could ruin the whole thing.

And so every little piece has to be perfect. And if I can’t get it perfect, then we shouldn’t do it at all. It’s better to not do it than to do it badly. And so my mantra throughout the launch was bad selling is better than no selling. It’s better to sell it bad.

And by that, I mean, to feel unskilled, to feel clunky in what I’m saying, especially when I’m talking about new things like the momentum project for the launch. I was talking about that. New concepts around that that I developed that I haven’t talked about as much as I’ve talked about other things like power planning and clean rest and the growth goal that I can talk about in my sleep, that I’m doing something new. I’m learning and growing in that way. And it’s better to do that badly than to not do it at all and then to just stay with what I’m comfortable with and what I’m very familiar with or what feels smart for me to say because I’ve said it so many times that I’ve refined it.

But initially, for example, power planning is such a good one. When I started talking about power planning, I didn’t have the words to articulate it. I was still, like, fleshing out that idea and that process and what power planning is and the steps. And so I just let myself talk about it badly. And the more that I talked about it badly, the better I got at talking about it.

And I’d say something and then someone would ask a question, and then I’d be like, okay. Well, what’s my answer to that? And then I’d say more. And it’s just like letting myself actually speak, letting myself actually do things is how I got so good at selling it and how I got so good at teaching it as well and how it’s now such a clear and simple process. You learn it inside PGSD to help you plan properly as a perfectionist and get your perfectionist brain working for you instead of against you.

Did that all come? And the results that our clients have created from power planning have all come from me being willing to talk about it badly, to teach it badly, to do it badly in the beginning when it was just something that I was doing myself in my own business, and I wasn’t teaching it to anyone else. I let myself go through the messiness of figuring that out. Okay. What do I do at the beginning, and how do I actually support my perfectionist brain?

Like, what edits do I need to make to all these different productivity tools I’ve learned so it actually doesn’t trigger my all or nothing mindset and doesn’t make me procrastinate. And so I was willing to do it bad so that I could get good. And I’ve talked about this with the podcast particularly. I think it’s because where it’s where I’ve been the most prolific, and it’s just such a great example of this and evidence of this, is that in the beginning, I recorded 2 episodes a week because it supported me. It helped me feel safe to do it bad because I knew, well, if this one’s shit like, this is literally what I said to myself.

If this one’s shit, then there’s a new episode coming in a few days, and it will, like, push it down the list of episodes. And I was coaching a PGSDer on this recently that she was saying that she was having a hard time creating Instagram feed posts, that she could do stories relatively easily. But for her, when it came to the feed posts, just like it was feeling so permanent and, like, such a big deal. And I know a lot of perfectionists experience that with anything that feels more like permanent, say if it’s something like writing a book or like creating a piece of art versus something that by the nature of it is more fleeting like an Instagram story where it disappears after 24 hours and it’s just like the culture around it is that it’s a more casual feel. It’s less polished.

That really helps support us to not have our perfectionism handbrake on it. Not that there aren’t perfectionists who have a really hard time recording stories because that’s definitely the case. But she was finding with the feed that the way she was thinking about it was in her mind, essentially, like, she had to do it perfectly because these posts were gonna be here forever. And also because she was creating a low volume of posts, I think she was doing maybe, like, 1 post per week, that it meant that if she was doing say, even if she posted for 12 weeks, for 3 months, all of those posts would still be right at the top of her feed. So it felt like such a big deal to post anything because it’s gonna be seen it’s like the thought of it’s gonna be seen by so many people for so long, so this needs to be really good.

It then makes it so much harder to create anything good because of all the pressure that’s being put on that. And so we don’t have as many creative ideas. We overthink what we’re saying. You might find that you create it, like, 80%, and then you don’t actually publish it because of this versus being able to set things up of, like, okay. I’m gonna do bad Instagram posts, and I’m gonna do a lot of them.

And we teach this inside PGSD. There’s an Aligned Marketing Workshop that will really support you with this. But really being able to say, like, in terms of having a low pressure action plan, an action plan that helps you to create without a lot of pressure, typically, almost always that involves creating a high volume of content. Because when there’s more volume, there’s less preciousness about each individual thing. Like for me, for example, I feel much less precious about each podcast episode because I know that there’ll be so many more to come that these episodes, even though, like, my brain is still like, like, is this episode gonna be any good?

All of that. Then I’m like, okay. But future me is gonna keep recording. So this episode, if it is shit, like, in 2 years to come, it’s gonna be really hard to find. Or even in, like, a few months to come, you’re gonna have to scroll and scroll and scroll.

So when you create a higher volume of content, it’s much easier. I used to do this back in the day with blogging as well when I created more blog posts or more YouTube videos. It was so much easier than when I was trying to do few but better. I do not recommend a few but better approach for perfectionists. If there’s one way to turn your perfectionism handbrake on, it’s trying to do a low volume of high quality work.

That will make your all or nothing thinking just come on like nothing else. That if you are having to do only a small volume of really good things, it’s so hard because you’re barely getting any practice to even get good at what you’re doing to even improve your skills. And it feels like everything you do is a test of whether or not you’re good enough. If you’re an artist, for example, it’s a test of whether you’re actually good at art versus if it’s like I’m gonna paint 10 different things and I’m gonna pick one of them to sell versus I need to create one thing to sell. So much harder.

So having a higher volume allows you to get those repetitions in so that you can actually do enough bad work to then be able to get good, to do enough practice, and to feel safer fumbling around while you’re doing it. It’s so much easier when there is a higher volume of work and when you set up the conditions that really support you to feel safe doing bad work. So I actually did an episode let me just find which number it is. Episode 484, how to create the emotional capacity to publish imperfect work. That was a really popular episode, and it’s speaking to this same idea as well.

And this is an idea I’ve spoken about so many times on the podcast because it’s so essential to understand this as a perfectionist. And so I’m gonna say it in all the different ways so that you actually have the, not just the intellectual understanding of it because you might already have that, but you actually have the willingness. You have the emotional capacity. You have the ability to do bad work, especially to do it publicly because you might be willing to do bad work in private. And I’m not saying you have to publish everything, but to be willing to do bad work publicly, it’s really essential.

I don’t think there’s any successful entrepreneur who has only done good work publicly, so to speak. Their perception what I’m talking about here is their perception or your perception of the work. So to the outside, it might look like and I know there are podcasters who are like, every episode is great. But to my brain, that’s not the case. So what I’m talking about here is my own perception of whether the work is good or bad and your own perception of whether the work is good or bad.

And I talk about it in that episode as well. I highly recommend listening to that, episode 484, that you’re not the best judge of whether your work is good or not. And that’s something that really encouraged me to just pick up the mic and record the way I know best, which is that whenever my brain has a thought that, like, this isn’t clear enough, I’m just rambling, those episodes are the episodes I get the most positive feedback about. It’s the episodes where I’m trying to get it right, where I’m trying to say the right words or meet a certain formula that I might be feeling like I’m smart and I’m saying it right, but it’s not connecting the way that it does when I just actually let myself show up and practice in public and share the things that I know today that I know are gonna be helpful. And so I wanna encourage you to do the same thing.

So what I wanna have you thinking about is how you can support yourself to do bad work. What conditions can you create for yourself so that it feels safe, or safer at least, to do bad work? Again, this typically will involve creating a higher volume of content. And if you were someone like, most perfectionists, if you were scared of burning yourself out, you will probably wanna take the, well, I’ll do fewer but better approach that I will post on Instagram once a week. It’s actually easier to post 5 times.

Because if you’re like, k. I’m gonna post once a week. That’ll take me an hour because that post has to be perfect. This is what’s happening in your brain. This post has to be perfect because I don’t post that often, and everyone’s just judging me based on this one post.

So I need to make sure it perfectly represents who I am. It perfectly articulates my ideas. It has the perfect call to action, the perfect graphic or photo. Maybe I need to research a bit more about the algorithm and what I should be doing from that. It’ll let me look at what this other person’s doing.

Like, that’s time consuming and very draining versus okay. Say I’m gonna take that same hour, and I’m gonna create 5 things in that time. I’m gonna batch together. I’m gonna go into my camera roll or into Canva or wherever. I’m gonna create 5 graphics or whatever way you do it.

I’m gonna just record 5 videos, 5 Reels or maybe if you’re gonna do Reels and it’s like a a talking to the camera 1. And this is when I I had an afternoon a couple of years ago. I was like, I’m gonna record. I actually found out that, I don’t think I knew it was twins yet, but I was pregnant. And I was like, I don’t know with the it was my second pregnancy.

I was like, I don’t know with the the first trimester when that’s gonna the symptoms are gonna start, and so I just wanna get a bunch of things recorded for Instagram today. And I just went around to different places in the house and I put some different outfits on, and I recorded, I think it was, like, 60 reels that it was just like me talking to camera. And I was just like, okay. What is something that I talk about all the time? I’ve said it a 1,000,000 times on the podcast or on a coaching call.

And, like, let me just say that thing, and I’m just gonna create so many that I don’t have to publish all of these. I’m just gonna, like, say a lot of things. And then after the fact, I can look back and judge it versus maybe like, hey, I need to say the perfect thing. And I’ve had times where my perfectionism hand break has been on with that and it’s like, it takes me 3 hours or an hour to record one reel that’s 90 seconds versus when it was the approach of I’m just gonna create lots of it, and it’s okay if it’s really bad. And if it’s super bad, I don’t have to publish it, but I’m just gonna let myself say the words.

And what I found was, and this comes back to being bad so you could be good, so to speak, is that some of the ideas I had was like, oh, that doesn’t like like, I haven’t fully fleshed that out enough or whatever. But then it would spark a different idea. Like, okay. Well, I could talk about this thing or I could take half of what I was saying and just have it be focused on that. Or I could say this other thing.

Okay. It just spurred so many ideas versus when I was trying to do good work, it ended up being bad. It ended up being bad because I was so in my head, overthinking it, procrastinating on it, so much resistance to overcome, so much judgment as I was creating, so much judgment after creating, so much judgment after publishing if I did manage to actually publish it. Doing bad work so you can get good is the secret. Because if you if you try to do good work only, because as perfectionists, that’s what we try to do, only good work, you will end up doing bad work because you don’t have enough practice to get good or because the work never even gets done.

You either don’t start the work, you don’t, like, carry on with the work, or you don’t finish the work. And I would call that bad work, so to speak, if we wanna look at it that way. A reason that perfectionist, we often don’t finish things or if you’re especially if as well, I’ve had a lot of questions about ADHD recently. And what I have found from we have a lot of PGSDers who have ADHD and there are many perfectionists who have ADHD that perfectionism really exacerbates any ADHD symptoms you might have. And a lot of the perfectionism signs and symptoms are similar as well.

So, for example, a perfectionist will have a hard time, typically, and it can manifest in different ways, but, typically, a hard time starting things and a hard time finishing things. Because if you start something, then it might not be as good as you had imagined it to be. There’s this whole, like, especially if you’re someone who identifies as being smart and intelligent, having a lot of potential, that starting is a vulnerable act. Because once you start it, you have to experience yourself doing the thing. You have to actually see if you’re good at it.

You have to experience emotions that might be uncomfortable. And if you’re a perfectionist, you’re probably quite disconnected with how you’re feeling and what’s going on in your body. Probably live up in your head like a lot of my clients do. And myself speaking from experience, that’s the way I have worked and I have had to do a lot of work to actually get connected with how I’m feeling and what’s going on in my body. But starting work as a perfectionist is a vulnerable act.

Also finishing work, also carrying on with work. But when you finish work, then it’s like as long as it’s not finished, there’s this hope of, like, what can be done to improve it, of how good it will be once it’s finished, of, oh my god, once I do finish it and it’s so good, here’s how successful it’ll be, or, like, all of these different things. Versus when you actually finish it, it’s a vulnerable act because then it can be received and judged by others and by yourself as well. So much of perfectionism is trying to avoid judgment from our future self, who’s gonna say it’s not good enough. Who do you think you are?

Like, we’re trying so hard to avoid that. So finishing things brings up that self criticism and that self judgment. So does starting things. So does avoiding things. Like, this is the irony of perfectionism.

We’re trying so hard to avoid shame, and yet, we feel ashamed about the avoidance that goes along with perfectionism. Some perfectionists tend towards the overworking, the overpreparing, but, ultimately, they’re avoiding feelings. They’re still avoiding things. It just looks more productive from the outside. They’re avoiding connection with themselves.

They’re avoiding uncertainty and trying to prepare things so that there’s no uncertainty. There’s still avoidance for all perfectionists because we’re trying to avoid shame, and there’s so much shame in avoidance. And, like, for me as a perfectionist, that has just been such a big unlock when I realized that of, like, oh, like, I’m trying so hard to avoid shame, which is just like this hot feeling in my face and my heart rate going up. Like, it’s not actually that bad. But I feel ashamed through, like, trying to avoid shame because of how I’m showing up and it not being consistent with how I’m viewing myself and what I know I’m capable of, and that feels shameful.

So at least if I am doing the bad work and showing up and giving it a go, then even if I end up feeling ashamed, at least I have some positive things happening with it. I’m developing skills. I am developing confidence versus if I’m wanting to avoid shame and I do that purely through avoidance and not showing up. And for me, that really is how perfectionism in business has shown up the most is avoidance, procrastination, overthinking, which I really think is procrastination as well. We overthink so that we don’t have to do.

If you’re thinking, then you’re not doing. So for me, that was a big way that it has showed up. It’s through avoidance, and I just felt ashamed about the avoidance, but I wasn’t then developing the skills. I wasn’t then actually getting to increase my knowledge because real knowledge comes through learning through doing, through taking action, experimenting, putting yourself out there, showing up. So you have to be willing to do bad work so you can get good, Or you won’t do any work at all.

All the work you do it’s just such an interesting thing to think about, but the work you do might feel good to you, but it won’t be well received. Or you could have done a lot more of it with a lot less energy. We tend to think more work, more energy. No. Like, you could have actually just let yourself show up freely and create.

And that great result that has come from doing the work, you could have a lot more of that. So letting yourself do bad work so you can get good is the secret to overcoming perfectionism and building a business. We gotta have you set things up, and we did this recently in PGSD. I taught a concept called the momentum project. I went through, in a workshop creating that, and I taught how to set it up so that you can feel safe to do bad work.

You can feel safe to actually do the things needed to do to create momentum in your business. You will be crippled by needing to only do good work. And for me with the podcast, when if I have to do a good podcast episode, I do not wanna do it. If I can do a bad one and if I have permission for myself to not publish it even if it is bad, like, if it is bad, great. It’s so much easier with the episodes I’ve recorded today.

Like, if it’s shit, I just I won’t publish it, or I can just, like, have it in my back pocket and I’ll do it in the future and have it go out. But I’m just gonna let myself create and see what happens. And so here I am with 3 way better podcast episodes that I’ve recorded today than if I was trying to do it perfect and get it right and therefore not doing it at all, or having it meet a certain criteria that makes it feel good to me, but actually doesn’t help you or connect with you. So with that said, I invite you to do bad work so you can get good. It’s the only way.

I love the mantra that bad selling is better than no selling. Bad marketing is better than no marketing. Bad writing is better than no marketing. A bad workout is better than no workout. A bad anything is better from the perspective of that is how you improve it.

If that is something you wanna improve, doing it bad is better than not doing it all. And that whole perfectionist mindset of if I can’t do it well, I’d rather not do it at all, That has to be broken to be able to have a successful business. It doesn’t burn you out. Because there are so many examples of people who would say I think Steven Butler’s a good one. He talks about, like, having so much attention to the details and, like, being so perfectionistic and pedantic about little details and why that’s so important.

But that for a perfectionist is a recipe for burnout, a recipe for being so unsatisfied and so unfulfilled and so disconnected and just not having any sense of freedom because it brings up that perfectionist thinking. Because especially if you’re in gilly stages of your business, you don’t know what details need to actually be meticulously focused on. You haven’t learned enough, which comes through taking, like, bad action, so to speak, doing bad work. You haven’t even learned enough to know what good looks like. You haven’t learned enough to know which details actually matter.

At some point, when you have an empire, it might make sense to think about that. But if you want to be able, especially if you’re not yet full time in your business or making a full time income, or if you if you struggle with burnout and you just wanna actually be able to build a sustainable business, creating permission and a framework for yourself, setting things up in a way that you can do bad work so you can get good is absolutely essential. Otherwise, you’re just not gonna do shit, and all the avoidance is gonna be bad. It’s gonna feel worse than the bad work. The shame that comes with that.

The shame that comes from avoidance, I would say, is is worse than the shame of the bad work. So let yourself be willing to experience that. I recommend episode 4 84. I’ve done a few different episodes. I mean, this is one of the main themes that I talk about.

We talk about it a lot inside PGSD. Everything in PGSD as well as the tool of power planning, the growth goal, clean rest, everything’s constructed to help you get into the mindset where you’re actually not just understanding that you need to do bad work so you can get good, but having you actually being willing to do that. So I wanna invite you into PGSD. We are opening for enrollment at the end of January. Date’s yet to be confirmed, but we will be opening for enrollment.

You can find out more about the program at samlaurabrown.com/pgsd. It’s a productivity program for early stage entrepreneurs to help you overcome perfectionism and take consistent action in your business without burning out so that your business can grow, so that you can reach your potential in your business. So, again, samlaurabrown.com/pgsd. It’ll be in the show notes. That is where you can go to sign up for the wait list, find out more about the program, get all the details so you can get ready to join us inside.

But I hope this episode has just inspired you to do some bad work today. And, again, you don’t have to publish it, but just, like, at least let yourself do it bad rather than pre-empting that it’ll be bad and so not doing it at all. You might be surprised what you find. With that said, I hope you’re having a beautiful day, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.

Outro

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Author: Sam Brown