Perfection is the Enemy: The Art of Persistence

Our Come Write In program provides libraries, bookstores, and other neighborhood hubs the resources to build and support a local writing community. Today, librarian Jennifer Joe at the Owensboro Regional Campus of Western Kentucky University shares how NaNoWriMo has taught her to embrace persistence and throw certain kinds of “perfection” out the window:

I am a campus librarian at a small, regional campus library in Kentucky. In fact, I am the campus librarian, which means that if activities are going to happen at my library, I am the one who is going to organize them. It took me three years on the job, but with some support from the larger university community, my library finally became a Come Write In location. As a passionate supporter of reading and writing, and a 10+ year participant of NaNoWriMo, it was my pleasure to finally combine my hobby with my profession.

However, this proved to be more difficult than I thought. We initially generated very little interest past “So what exactly is National Novel Writing Month?” We have a large white board in my library, on which I taped the NaNoWriMo poster that came in the library’s Come Write In kit. Next to it was a running tally for word counts of anyone who wanted to participate. In the middle of the month, there were three names on the board, one of which was my own. It was disheartening, but I persisted.

I told people that they could do it. I explained to them that motivation is the deciding factor, and perfection is the enemy. 

I didn’t just mean the perfection of trying to get the words down in the right order the first time. My students are all adults (one of my participants is twenty-one, the other, old enough to be her mother), and I think they are old enough to realize that it is rare that anyone writes anything perfectly the first time. 

Sometimes the real enemy can be thinking of “perfection” as obtaining your goal. Several people have balked at the idea of NaNoWriMo because they do not think they can succeed, and for them, if they do not succeed, they have gained nothing.

“Working to make your dreams a reality, even if they do not come to fruition this time, can give you the confidence to try again.”

This goes against everything I have ever learned from NaNoWriMo. The goal has never been perfection. While getting to 50,000 words and getting that shiny purple bar would have been fabulous (both for me and for my two new participants), it is only secondary to the real goal: go for something you have never tried before, or that you have tried before and failed, and work harder than you ever thought possible. Working to make your dreams a reality, even if they do not come to fruition this time, can give you the confidence to try again. And again. And again. It’s about perseverance.

Near the end of the month, we had a late-comer join us. His tally, at least on my whiteboard, never reached past 5,000, but he–and the rest of us–can say we tried. And his is most definitely a story of rejecting perfection–he knew what a long shot it was that he could win, starting when he did. But he wrote anyway.

He has inspired me, too. If someone can join in at the last minute and have fun challenging themselves despite the obstacle, I can–and I will–keep promoting NaNoWriMo at my campus, even though my students are too busy, too concerned with school, too stressed with their everyday lives. Because NaNoWriMo has taught me perseverance, and I think it can help them, too.

Jennifer Joe is the Campus Librarian at Western Kentucky University’s Owensboro Regional Campus. She has been participating in NaNoWriMo for 12 years (and won 11 of them), but last year was the first year she guided other participants through the process! She’s excited about her library being a Come Write In location and hopes that it will help her students learn to pursue their passions no matter the obstacles.

Top photo by Flickr user Tien Phuc.