I remember when I was a kid I shared a room with 4 of my brothers. You can just imagine how much destruction 4 boys can cause in a short amount of time, especially when there are plastic army men and “bases” involved!
When play time was over and it was time to put the room back together, we’d sometimes work hard for an hour or two cleaning up. We’d call Dad in to check it and he’d ALWAYS point out all the things we’d missed.
We would say: “But Dad! You should have seen it before! Then you’d know how hard we worked to get it like this!” Not that it ever had any effect. If the room wasn’t clean, it wasn’t clean.
That used to really bug me, until I realized that without Dad seeing what it was like before, there was no way he could know we had worked our tails off. For all he knew, we could have been goofing off the whole time.
The same holds true in many areas of life. No one cares about how far your product development has come if you release it too early (Yes, Windows Vista, I’m talking to you). No one cares that you wrote 120 pages of your ebook if they buy it and it’s not finished. No one knows you spent all week working on that video or blog post.
If it’s not finished, keep going until it is.
You don’t have to be a perfectionist about it, but you do have to at least finish it!
Whenever you “finish” anything worth doing, set it aside for a few hours or overnight. The bigger the project, the longer you should set it aside. When you’re ready, put yourself in the mindset of someone seeing it for the first time and look it over with fresh eyes. It’s amazing the things you’ll pick up.
Doing so will go a long way to change your work from amateur to professional almost instantaneously.
After I “finish” writing every post on this or other sites, I leave it for at least an hour and come back fresh. While my writing will never be perfect, I see things I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Often times, what’s in my head doesn’t come out right the first time. After I leave it for a bit, the right phrasing usually comes naturally.
We’re all taught to do it at school, but how often have you done it lately?
Try it and see what a difference it makes.