Being an absolute perfectionist is an excellent way to achieve nothing. There’s no substitute for output. It’s also true that working with other people allows me to go much further than I could go on my own.

However, authenticity, taste, specificity, principle, intentionality, and consistency are what burn a brand (personal or corporate) into the minds of an audience. They also allow me to live with what I’ve created and continue to be excited to create. Achieving this requires having very high standards. I must ignore distractions that don’t align with my mission, because there’s hardly such a thing as a neutral opportunity.

Every choice I make will bring me either pride or shame. Every choice I make will alienate some people and draw in others. Every collaboration I engage in will tint my public persona with those of my collaborators. If I allow myself to be dragged along into choices that don’t align with my goals, I will become jaded and burnt-out, and I will want to quit.

When I focus on how high the stakes are, I want to retreat. All I think about is risk. It’s so easy to lose what I have and what I could have had by diluting or corrupting my image.

I end up defaulting to rejecting the influences of others. If I don’t absolutely love it, then I don’t engage.

This can make it difficult to work with partners who don’t share my exact same biases, motives, and vision. I don’t have an army of clones to work with, so that’s untenable. But where is the line between compromising so that you can get stuff done, and compromising so much that it’s not worth doing?