What If Today’s Version Is What Someone Needs?

Holding back in the name of perfection, or the short route of pressing the AI button, may hinder your most impactful work

There’s something that happens when we care about our work, we stall.

We convince ourselves it needs another tweak, another review, or final polish. The longer we hold on, the fewer people get to see what we made. Worse still, the more weight of perfection starts to carry. This is a cycle that many creative and thoughtful people fall into, especially those who genuinely want to make a difference.

This article is influenced from a moment in a recent YATM Club, Swapsies session. 

This is a knowledge sharing session where the focus was on video creation. Matt King, is an extremely talented person when it comes to creating video and shared his hesitation about publishing his work. This feeling resonates with many of us, we often look up to those we admire and feel that our own work doesn’t yet measure up to our aspirations. We might think, “Maybe tomorrow it will be good enough, but not today.”

Tamara Howard replied with a response that landed and made me think (hence progressing the ideas I want to share with you).

“Even if you’re unsure, it might just be the thing that someone else needs today.”

It raised a question that sits alongside what I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

Are we creating to impress algorithms, or to make an impact on someone else?

In 2019, I wrote about how perfectionism often masks something deeper, the fear of being ignored or misunderstood. In Striving For Perfection, I shared, ”Perfection becomes a wall we hide behind. But it’s a wall that blocks others from seeing what we stand for.”

And even further back in 2017’s Normal Is The Differentiator, I challenged the belief that better always means more polished or more conventional. We don’t need to play in the same lane as everyone else.

This tension is still with us, only now it’s amplified by the platforms we publish on.

Social media makes everything feel like a performance. LinkedIn, for instance, is geared toward views, not value.

There’s pressure to hit the right tone, optimise the first line (I feel myself drawn into this even more), make sure you add a comment and watch for a number that tells you how worthy your contribution is.

You can work for hours on something personal, thoughtful, useful, share it and receive four likes. It feels like a slap.

Then again, those metrics are not a measure of impact. They’re feedback on how the algorithm felt that day. Not whether your words resonated. Not whether they helped someone. 

When we always aim for something higher or the person we want to be, we hesitate and we take that step back.

Often, we never return. Every delay adds another layer of self-doubt. Every draft feels further from finished. There are many unpublished drafts when looking in my WordPress ‘posts’ where I just held back from sharing. In my head, it meant that no one would call me out or become the day I got it wrong. 

It also meant that no one saw or potentially helped someone with an idea to progress.

This is where it becomes even more challenging today. 

We can take a step back and feel we’re not ready or even worse let AI become the fallback for all our content creation. It’s not because AI is bad, but it’s tempting to use it to avoid the discomfort of real creativity.

Perfection isn’t just delaying us, in 2025 it’s driving us toward convenience. 

If we wait long enough, we might just hand over the entire job to AI tools. Then again whilst it can replicate our voice, can it capture our humour, heart, or the hill we’re prepared to die on? The more we strive for polished sameness, the easier it is to let the machine do the work. But what makes your work resonate is what makes it yours. Don’t sterilise the things that make you different.

When we hold back for fear of not being perfect or reaching out to the person we think we want to be, we often sand down our uniqueness, the very things that make people want to follow us, trust us, and buy from us. We trade the risk of being overlooked, for the safety of meeting people’s expectations.

In that Swapsies moment, what Matt said came from a place of creative integrity, wanting to be proud of your work, to have it match your ideals. Tamara reminded us this:

Impact doesn’t always come from mastery. It often comes from timing.

Someone may need to hear what you’ve got to say, not next week, not in its refined form in the future, but now. That’s a reason to let go a little sooner.

Here’s what I wrote down after the session:

Share when it’s ready, not when it’s perfect

Share even when you’re unsure, especially when you’re unsure

Share to connect a thought, not to impress

Share to help, not to perform

Share because what you say might move someone else to begin

Creating for Visibility or Creating for Value?

This is the dilemma we’re in today, social platforms push us to be visible. But visibility often leads us to perform. The game becomes about reach, engagement and attention.

But attention isn’t your job. Value is.

This is why I continue to send a newsletter each Thursday. It’s not at the mercy of algorithmic favouritism. It doesn’t require gaming someone else’s system. A newsletter says: this is for you. One person. One inbox. Then we move onto next week. 

Giving yourself deadlines for a day of the week you promise you’ll show you for other people. It does give you practice of repetition, so you can’t hesitate and miss a week, particularly if people have subscribed to hear from you.

You don’t need thousands of likes. You need a handful of people to say, “This helped.”

When we say our work is not good enough or not quite ready, what do we mean? Not polished enough? Not popular enough? Or not helpful enough?

Perfection is often measured by the wrong yardstick, slick visuals, crafted copy, high production. When we think about good work, it’s there to change people. It shifts perspective and builds trust.

The best creators I know don’t obsess over polish. They obsess over impact. And they understand that creating work is meant to be valuable. I love this manifesto that Sonja Nisson and Sharon Tanton shared in Valuable Content.

If you’re sitting on an idea, a post, a sketch of an article, and you’re thinking, “Maybe not yet…”, the last thing you want is to feel held back.

Tamara’s point that “someone might need it today” aligns with “you never know who’s looking.”

Who might this help now? It’s a call to act now, not later.

Let that answer guide your actions.

The more we let our anxieties become the editor, the less our ideas have a chance to do their job.

What you share doesn’t have to change the world. It just has to change someone’s day.

And that is enough.

If you’d like to join in with our sessions in YATM Club, have a look at how the Club can be of benefit to you. Read more here and look forward to seeing you in our happy home, off grid.