One of my big challenges is being able to call a thing FINISHED. It’s like I just can’t say a project is done if it’s not perfect, so nothing is ever done.

I’m afraid to tell people about it or put it to use. I don’t recognize when something is good enough, ready to roll . . . workable.

I might need to take the word “finished” out of my vocabulary, and replace it with READY.

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We’ve had a redesign/rebuild/expansion of a site in the works for years now, even paying monthly for a big script since August of 2010. And until this month, nobody saw any of that. I still haven’t officially announced it to the people who use it.

There are still things I want to fix and make prettier and cooler! It’s a site we rely on to make around 10% of our money. It used to be more, and SHOULD be significantly more (without us getting famous, we should get around 25% of our net income from that site, and probably 50-75% of our gross membership-site sales should COME from there – actually, if it REALLY worked, the people who use it would MAKE us “famous”), so this isn’t just a hobby site. It’s the face and most of the working parts of our affiliate program – an integral component of most (or lots of) businesses that sell stuff online.

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Today as I struggled to “finish” more things on this website/project, it got to the point of absurdity like I was just MAKING UP REASONS not to call it done. I could see that none of the things I was doing were really vital. Like, the site will still work if my google analytics code isn’t on every single page.

Then I thought about every apartment and house I’ve moved into. None of them were perfect. I think every single one of them had SOMETHING that was broken and/or a big fucking mess when we moved in. One of them had a pipe missing under a sink. The wooden bedroom floor of another was covered in sawdust. The paint and/or carpet was still wet and smelly in lots of them. And I was happy to move into every single one of them! I didn’t want to wait . . . they were good enough. They were ready! And usually those unfinished things got fixed or we cleaned it up ourselves or the paint just dried or they stopped mattering.

Some things are never finished. Houses are never finished. Big dynamic websites are never finished. They evolve, they have to be maintained. Their structure and design needs to change when people grow and change and get bigger and better.

It’s time to move into this site. IT IS READY. I have to stop worrying that it’s not finished . . . that’s not even possible.

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I guess part of the challenge is letting go of my ego in order to just be practical. I have to be okay with people seeing imperfections. I have to be okay with celebrating being DONE with this project without seeing immediate measurable results – the marketing of the site and its ongoing success are different projects. They do not need to coincide with the release – the letting go – the acknowledgement of “READY” of this one (which is actually like THREE whole sites: a blog, something like a tour/”free” area, and the area for active affiliates . . . plus generating the content for all of those areas).

Lightning Allie is helping with this (both the site and the psychological(?) challenges), but I have to practice a lot more. I’m still not finished with trying to be finished. But maybe I’m almost ready?

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It’s not like I’ve never launched a site before it was perfect – none of my sites are perfect, none of them were “done” when we started getting members or readers or surfers or whatever. After eleven years of imperfect websites, though, I think it’s more and more painful every time I put something out into the world that I can see could be so much better in a million zillion ways.

I *should* be getting more and more realistic and practical and accepting, but instead I’m almost forty and I guess I just want to have something PERFECT to show for it. Like, can’t I do anything right? At this age? With all of this experience?

This is a spiritual issue. I need to keep working on letting go of this bullshit.