Dear First name / creative,
As a service provider, do you ever feel the pressure of having it all figured out before you approach clients with your offerings?
I notice this general impression of services as a one-and-done deal, refined to a smooth polish long before they launch. They show up on investment guides as a complete package—not a single pixel out of place—to businesses that think each item is well suited to their needs. All that's left to do is to market what is essentially a finished work.
So with the best of intentions, you might spend countless days and nights honing your craft and perfecting your process in private. You try your best to conjure your ideal client: what they're drawn towards, what they might need from you, what you can promise them. Is your work good enough yet? Then you hesitate at the last minute, wondering if your timing is off.
But here's the truth: Perfection does not exist outside the mind. It cannot inspire on its own. It intimidates you into inaction, especially when the gap between imagination and reality grows far too much to bear.
My experience taught me something else. Expertise doesn't come from a single move executed with flourish. Instead, it emerges from a series of small steps. Expertise is the natural consequence of always showing up, however imperfectly, from a place of earnestness and openness to learn.
Sometimes it's a matter of taking the leap with what you have right now, then gathering feedback from real people who care—not from your imagined inner critic.
This was how I got scrappy in my early days, grasping the concept of code along the way as I encountered clients with specific requests. I didn't have it all figured out. But I did take what I learned from one project to improve the next. With iteration over perfection in mind, even mistakes turn into valuable insight rather than failure.
Our craft may be a work in progress, but we can take comfort in knowing that our effort makes us show up a little better each time.
