Publish your imperfection and free your growth
Perfectionism is a cage disguised as virtue, so publish your rough drafts, and let the world meet you as you are.
A few years ago, I would have laughed at the phrase “done is better than perfect” because to me, perfection was safety.
I believed that if I polished every sentence, rehearsed every word, and agonised over every choice, then I could avoid failure, rejection, or embarrassment. What I did not see was that this devotion to perfection was a form of control, a way of clinging to an illusion that I could prevent life from surprising me.
Perfectionism is not really about excellence because it is a fear dressed up as virtue. It whispers that if you hold off just a little longer, wait for the right moment, find the exact word, then you will be ready.
However, life is never waiting because the market moves forward, your peers create and publish, and the opportunities that belong to this moment will vanish if you hide behind polish. I learned this as a creator when I spent weeks editing a single article, only to realise later that the raw posts I wrote in a single sitting sparked more connection, more conversation, and more leads.
The truth is spiritual as much as it is practical. Every time you delay publishing, you reinforce the illusion that there is some perfect version of you that must emerge before the world can see your work. This is the same illusion that keeps us from living fully: waiting to be healed before we love, waiting to be rich before we rest, waiting to be confident before we take the stage.
However, life is not about waiting to be perfect because it is about moving with what you already carry. The Tao does not withhold its flow until the river is straightened as it moves in curves, bends, and imperfections.
The entrepreneurs and creators we admire did not arrive polished. Instead, they arrived raw, uncertain, and exposed. They published first drafts, launched minimum viable products, and showed their faces online before they felt comfortable.
The irony is that what made them magnetic was not their perfection but their willingness to show up imperfectly and improve in public. Every iteration became a breadcrumb of trust, each misstep a mirror that reflected growth, and each published piece of work a seed that compounded over time.
When I started writing publicly about my life, like the messy, complicated reality of being a queer and gender-fluid parent in Singapore, what drew people in was never my polish.
It was my willingness to ship stories before they felt safe, to share learnings while still learning, to publish drafts of myself in motion. That vulnerability, far from weakness, became my edge and reminded me that connection lives in honesty, not in flawlessness.
The lesson here is that perfectionism is an attempt to separate yourself from the present moment. You are trying to stand outside of time, to create from some imaginary future where everything aligns, but the only place you can ever create is here and now.
As Alan Watts taught, the perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. When you stop choosing conditions and simply allow the work to be what it is today, you discover freedom.
So here is your practice. Set a timer for 30 minutes where you write, design, record, or build something, and when the timer goes off, publish it. No polishing, no rearranging and no waiting for the perfect angle.
Let it be imperfect, because imperfection is the only way anything real enters the world. Each act of publishing is an act of surrender and each surrender is a step closer to the kind of freedom no polished draft will ever deliver.