The fear of creating - get over it and just do it!

"Don't let 'perfect' get in the way of 'good enough.'"

-Unknown

Happy New Year and welcome to my first blog post of 2014. Read on, it's gonna be glorious!

Writing and creating can be filled with fear and anxiety, but it shouldn't be. Once you get over that initial hesitation, it's a really rewarding experience.

My wife Vicky made a New Year's resolution to write Yelp reviews for the restaurants at which we eat. She's already written two reviews; check them out here and follow her! When Vicky was writing her first review about our New Year's Eve dinner at Kapnos, she went through exactly what I experienced when I wrote my first blog post almost three years ago: the strive for perfection, fear of being scrutinized, and overall hesitation to hit "publish." I'm sure she proofread it many times. She had me read it once and asked me to read it again (I declined). It took her over two hours to write that review. I know how that feels.

Most of us are trained to do things perfectly and thoroughly at our jobs, and if you spoke with people who have worked with me in the past, they might say that I took this to a whole new level. While there are plenty of situations where this mindset is valid, many times it just hampers our ability to get stuff done.

That blog post or restaurant review doesn't have to be perfect. It's easy for people to negatively criticize, but who cares what they say. Just get it out there, obtain feedback, learn from it, iterate, and improve. I got over the hump. Vicky got over the hump. And you can too.

It's already taken me too long to write this post. I'm hitting "publish" right now.

I hope you found this interesting! If so, please connect with me on Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn for future updates.

Image courtesy of Giphy