Note:
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn in July 2015.
It never fails.
You work for days, weeks, months, and, in some cases, years on a publication. You (and in some cases a team) put many hours composing text, photos, and graphics. It's all on the pages and ready to go.
You send it to the printer or distribute it electronically. So proud of the job you did, you open up your masterpiece to admire your finished work.
That's when your sense of pride turns into despair.
Upon further review, you begin to notice every little mistake or oversight. A missing comma here, a misspelled word there jumps right off the page. There's a misplaced modifier staring you right in the face. And that photo isn't cropped quite right, is it?
A former boss of mine had a term for it: post-publishing syndrome. You can also find it under some online discussions for post-publishing depression.
I know it's something I suffer from. There have been several occasions where I looked at a finished product and asked myself a bunch of "what ifs."
"What if I made that box blue instead of green?"
"Why didn't I arrange those elements the other way?"
I think this feeling of "Boy, did I screw this up" stems from us having dedicated so much time to a project we'll only be satisfied with perfection. And I've found that personally, the more time I spent working on a project the more the mistakes stick out and the harder they are to accept.
If this is something that affects you like it does me, try to think of Richard Carlson's advice and don't sweat it so much. Here are some things I've learned in my life when I've beaten myself up about small mistakes in projects I've done:
Most people who read or see your work won't realize there's anything wrong to begin with. My wife will often tell me when I point something out that she wouldn't have even noticed it had I not said something. "Only YOU would notice something like that," is something I hear with more frequency than I would like to admit.
You're not perfect. Deal with it. I always strive for perfection. But over the course my life and career, I've had to come to the realization that things aren't going to go completely as planned.
Small mistakes are just that - small. Sure, big mistakes can cause big problems if they find their way out into the wild (As someone who works for a state auditor, I know the great importance of making sure every dollar amount and fact are 100% correct. Wrong numbers or facts = big deal). But there are much bigger issues in the world than a couple cases of wrong punctuation or incorrect sentence tense. Providing everyone on Earth with clean water to drink is leaps and bounds more important than your inclusion or exclusion of the Oxford comma.
Like I mentioned before, I'm not writing this as advice for only you the reader but for myself to work on as well. If you're someone who beats yourself up over your finished product, I hope you get some comfort in knowing you're not alone.
Now please excuse me while I critique myself over the way I wrote this article.
Photo credit: 2008-01-26 (Editing a paper) - 04 by Nic McPhee, courtesy of flickr.com: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nics_events/2350460396/in/album-72157604187126188/