How does perfectionism hurt artists when building their art business?

Perfectionism becomes poison when you shift from creating art to running the business and doing marketing. The areas where you have perfectionist tendencies will prevent you from actually executing tasks. When you add up all the time wasted being a perfectionist on specific projects, you end up wasting years of your life on things that won’t move the needle or have real impact. The key is to look for the 80/20 in every business task - get it to a B or B+ level where 80% of the value already exists, rather than spending enormous time on the final 20% that provides minimal marginal benefit. Artists who execute more experiments and ship more projects in the same amount of time will get further than those who perfect three projects while someone else completes fifty.

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Asked by general teaching point · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2020-09-02