Get Out of Tinker Town

Welcome to Creatives Anonymous, a weekly newsletter about navigating creativity in the 21st century. It inspires, encourages, and empowers readers to take back their creative power.

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There's one place any creative knows all too well: Tinker Town. 

Tinker Town is our private space where we can mess around with our creative projects until we're ready to share them with the public (hence the name). We keep playing and tinkering with our projects until we deem them “perfect.” There are no eyeballs on us to watch us mess up and fail. It's our safe space and our comfort zone, somewhere we never want to leave.

That's exactly why we need to leave it. 

Most of us spend so much time in Tinker Town that we might as well own a vacation home and split time. But in all seriousness, the more time we spend in Tinker Town, the less time we spend putting our work out there. It becomes nothing more than just another form of procrastination. 

I frequently visit Tinker Town and tend to overstay my welcome. It's gotten the best of me lately as I've been working on pivoting my business. I keep waiting for everything to be "perfect" before shipping anything instead of just taking messy action and building in public. 

However, I think that the need for perfectionism stems from fear. 

As creatives, we tend to suffer from performance anxiety, where our fear hijacks our courage, preventing us from taking risks. Taking creative risks is uncomfortable. We don’t know how our work will be received so we’re afraid to even try. We’d much rather stay in our comfort zone (a.k.a. Tinker Town) and live with that fear of failure. This fear prevents us from starting creative projects because we're afraid that we won't be able to follow through. We're scared that we’ll let ourselves or others down and fail. 

That's why we're hesitant to leave Tinker Town to share our work and build in public. 

Building in public means putting our work on a bigger stage for the world to see. We're taking people along in our journey and behind the scenes into our thought processes and inner world. We're giving people permission to comment on our work in progress, giving us their unsolicited opinions. We're at our most vulnerable, so we avoid it at all costs. 

On the other hand, building in public allows us to get messy, embrace imperfect action, and optimize along the way. It also gives us a space to co-create with others and to show up as we are, no matter where we’re at in our creative journey.

Instead of embracing a perfectionist mentality, we need to embrace a “done is better than perfect” one. Of course, it’s easier said than done, as making this shift is one of the hardest mindset shifts to make. It takes a lot of restraint and discipline to prevent returning to Tinker Town. 

As they say, let chaos reign and then reign in the chaos. 

Something magical happens when we get the courage to leave Tinker Town and put our work out there—we start to gain momentum and motivation to create even more. Last month alone, I published the first three issues of this newsletter, two articles on Medium, and ~5,000 words of my manuscript. The momentum is addictive and gives us some quick wins. Most importantly, it makes us want to create more.  

The more you ship, the clearer things become. Taking action creates clarity. We might not see it at first, but everything eventually becomes fluid the more action we take. What matters is getting our creative reps in. After all, practice makes progress. And thanks to that newfound momentum from creating, it becomes easier to do it. 

We still need Tinker Town to act as a creative sandbox. But we need to treat it less like a permanent move and more like a vacation—spend a few days there to get your bearings before booking a one-way ticket out. 

Perfection is the enemy of creativity. We'll never create anything if we wait for things to be perfect. And the reality is that nothing will ever be perfect. You'll always find mistakes or something else you can tweak. 

There's a fine line between getting it “perfect” and being scared to try—we just have to find out where it is for ourselves. 

CREATIVE CORNER

• 🎞️ What I’m consuming: I recently finished Free Money by Austin L. Church. 10/10 recommend for any freelancer or creative entrepreneur.

• 💡 What I’m loving: I’m starting to put together my spring capsule wardrobe and toying with the idea of doing the Project 333 Challenge.

• 🎨 What I’m working on: Still working on the manuscript. Last night, I did an immersive writing session for two hours and cranked out ~1,800 words. I love working to these themed sessions!

• 💭 Weekly musing:

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