It sounds arrogant to say this, but I’m never satisfied with anything I create. I nitpick. I never let myself get humble enough to see something as “good enough.” It might be a curse, but it’s helped to push me to my creative boundaries.
The biggest problem comes when I need to get things done.
I’m talking about losing sleep over a t-shirt design. A T-SHIRT DESIGN. For a school with 1,800 students in the middle of Indiana. It shouldn’t matter, but it does to me. This behavior isn’t healthy. It’s the kind of crap that I would emphasize in a job interview and that I can get away with doing for the next 10 years or so, but once I start to settle down, this can jeopardize relationships and crumble my psyche like Francis Ford Coppola in “Hearts of Darkness.”
The biggest thing I’ve learned this year is to find that spot where something is “good enough.” I can’t get away with redesigning the chrome for our CSSE351 audio visualizer during the public presentation anymore (though the fact that it was made in WebGL made it easy to do that, but I digress). I’ve got a bank of people I trust that I know can stop me when something’s of a reasonable quality, and I know I have to make sure that list either stays constant or grows reasonably.