Perfect or Good?

I don’t feel like I have anything really worthy to say right now. I have thoughts. I even have ideas for blogs that I want to write. But God help me, I’m just not in the mood.

I think that’s what has really prevented me from growing - in a lot of different ways - throughout my life.

We all have our own struggles. One of my biggest is wanting to be perfect, and wanting everything that I do to be perfect. It’s why I’ve written the first line of ten books and ten movies, but never finished any of them. Never gotten close. I just get paralyzed with fear.

I remember in high school, I couldn’t dive into a pool. I would start to try to dive in, from the side of the pool, but I would never dive head first. I had a hang-up in my brain, for whatever reason, and so my whole body would just kind of go in all at once. And it looked ridiculous and awkward.

Then a dude told me that I had to pretend that there was a wall in the water. I had to imagine that three feet into the pool, there was a wooden board that came up, two feet above the water. And I had to imagine that I had to clear that wall.

I’m still not great at diving into a pool, but from that moment on, I wasn’t pathetic. I look like I’m bad at diving into a pool...but I don’t look like a deer getting pushed off an embankment.

Literally, that one tip was all I needed. I just have to pretend there’s a wall there.

Is there an analogy? Is there something like that for my fear of failure? I always think there has to be some intensive process to fix myself emotionally. If I’m ever going to just start writing scripts, and not caring that they’re bad, and just get to work and start producing more...surely it will take some massive, life-changing shift in attitude. It would take years of trying to understand myself, and realizing that I was made fun of when I was 6, and that my older brother liked hanging out with his friends more than me. And then spending a few more years figuring out how to undo that damage, so that maybe - someday - I can overcome my paralyzing fear of failure.

Or maybe, I just need to imagine there’s a wooden board there. Maybe it’s that easy.

The dude’s name was John Ulrich. It was 11th grade gym class. Where is he now that I need him?