Here’s an anecdote for you, which I am now repeating something like fifth-hand, after yanking it off Mike Darga’s excellent game-design blog:

Here’s a story I heard from Alexander Kjerulf, who was talking about David Bayles’s book “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking”:

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. All those on the right would be graded solely on their works’ quality.

His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group; 50 pound of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A.

At grading time, the works with the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.

Think about this in your own life, even if you’re not using clay. The more you practice, the better you’ll get. But you can’t practice if you think only of perfection. Practice is about making mistakes; perfection comes from imperfection.

Darga uses this anecdote to reinforce the idea that perfectionism is another form of procrastination. I think that’s a little backward of how I do it — I sometimes procrastinate when I think I’m not up to creating something perfect — but, and here’s the important thing, the result is the same. Put another way, Voltaire’s way, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

I’ve always taken that to mean that we shouldn’t avoid doing good work, or appreciating good work, because we are capable of fathoming perfection. We can set out to work, and work well, and do good, but perfection is daunting to attempt. It is, in other words, an excuse not to try.

Sometimes that means the perfect is an excuse not to try to make something, but it goes both ways. It can be an excuse not to try to accept something, or appreciate something, or love something, but it is a poor excuse for all those things. Perfection is excellence, not a standard. We must be realistic.

I’m telling you this because I’m telling myself this. I’d rather have written a lot of things than no things, and if I aim for perfection, I deny myself one of those options.