Talks to Motivate You Playlist (3/10): Is perfectionism just procrastination in disguise? | Jon Youshaei

0:03Hey, everyone. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Welcome back to our first podcast playlist of 2026. Today, we have dropped 10 talks from our archive onto the feed all at once to motivate you, to keep you going when things are hard, to inspire you as the weather shifts, to help kickstart that new project or idea. or if things are feeling good for you right now, just to offer a different perspective. Whatever type of motivation you might need, we have a TED Talk for that. Next up in our motivation playlist, when I was first starting out in journalism, I remember editors saying, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

0:49That is, sometimes you have to stop tinkering and just ship a product or release the story in order to get it out on deadline. In this talk from 2024, video creator John Ushai shares how he battled perfectionism when it came to his digital creations and sheds light on how he found a way to push through and overcome it to create an authentic online presence and build community. That's coming up right after a short break.

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3:54And now, our TED Talk of the day.

3:57Jon Youshaei: I have a confession. As a YouTuber, I make videos for a living. Yet I still get severe anxiety every time I go to hit the upload button to post my next video. I finish my video and I go to save it as final. But then I noticed that I could trim off a few parts of it and make it even better. So I resave that file as final underscore final. But then I'm like, wait, wait, wait. I can make the audio a bit better. I can make the color more saturated. Let me resave it as final, but actually. And then I repeat this process 29 more times until I save 29 more versions of that same damn video. Until sometimes I honestly still don't upload it because it's still not good enough.

4:42Jon Youshaei: My obsession with perfection got so bad that in my first year on YouTube, I only uploaded six videos. But hey, as they say, quality over quantity, right? What started to bring me out of my spiral was something I remember during my eight years working at YouTube and Instagram, where I met many creators and artists before trying to become one myself. And specifically, one person who completely changed my perspective on how creativity actually works. And that one person is none other than the one and only James Corden. Yeah, the guy from Cats. You see, James did something so profound and different with his late night show and YouTube channel that he often doesn't get enough credit for it.

5:22Jon Youshaei: For years, late night hosts had primarily structured their shows around two formats, two segments, monologues and interviews. But Corden came along and he's like, you know what, I'm going to experiment with 109 different formats, from Carpool Karaoke to Crosswalk Musical to Riff Off, to the point where he uploaded a staggering 5 ,700 videos, and he soon surpassed nearly all the other late night shows in subscribers, despite starting from way behind. And while many of us may remember Corden for his popular formats like Carpool Karaoke, which has now totaled over one billion views, we don't even talk about and forget about the many, many flops he's had, like formats like musical shares.

6:05Jon Youshaei: An actual format where he played musical chairs with share impersonators. That happened. And all this got me thinking that maybe I should be creating more like Corden. Maybe I should be prioritizing publishing my work instead of just perfecting it because you never know what will take off. And then it really hit home when I started seeing this trend across different artists, innovators, and entrepreneurs throughout time. And I came across perhaps the biggest badass in history. Wolfgang Amadeus, I'm going to kick everybody's ass, Mozart. Because Mozart wasn't the masterpiece making machine that history makes him seem to be.

6:42Jon Youshaei: No. Some of his early critics called his music far too noisy. But Wolfie just brushed that dirt off his shoulder and he proceeded to make over 600 compositions in his career before dying at age 35, which was far, far more than his peers who only averaged 150 compositions despite living way longer. That was Mozart's method. He was obsessed about quantity as much as quality. He was committed to creating countless compositions that we have now forgotten to get the just small handful of masterpieces we now remember. Well, let's talk about another example. How about the guy who created this creepy cyborg doll?

7:17Jon Youshaei: He got a ton of public ridicule, but by the way, he's also the guy who invented 1 ,092 other inventions, including a little thing called the light bulb. So yeah, Thomas Edison didn't even have the best light bulb moments, yet he persisted past his imperfections and bad ideas too. Or how about Monet, the legendary artist? Most people don't know that he created over 2 ,000 works of art in his career. But here's what crushes my soul about Monet, because that number should be way higher. You see, Monet was such a perfectionist that one time he worked on a set of paintings for over three years, until at the last moment when they were supposed to debut the paintings in Paris, he saw slight imperfections in the corners.

7:58Jon Youshaei: So he took out a butcher knife and he slashed through every single painting he made, because it wasn't perfect enough for him. But curators and scholars today say that he destroyed over$3.4 million worth of art that night just because it wasn't perfect enough. Which got me thinking, how many of us are too much like Monet instead of Mozart, Edison, or even Corden? How many of us slash our work at the last second instead of just shipping it? And how many of us have unknowingly left masterpieces on the floor because we got two in our heads? For me, it was only once I started shifting my mindset from Monet to Mozart that I saw a real change in my career as a creator.

8:37Jon Youshaei: That after posting an embarrassing six videos in my first year, we went on to post 173 videos that got over 300 million views, and somehow our channel became one of the fastest growing on YouTube. And yes, we had tons of flops, even more than ever, but I now realize that cringing at your past work is proof of progress. And sometimes perfectionism is just procrastination in disguise. And a lot of our most popular videos were actually our most imperfect. We had videos with not the best coloring, not the best lighting, not the best audio. Some shots were blurry, yet they still got millions of views.

9:12Jon Youshaei: So next time you're working on your next big idea, I beg of you, for the love of God, put down your knife. Be Mozart, not Monet. Every artist, every entrepreneur, or anybody who's ever pushed envelope, even a millimeter, has experienced anxiety. You're going to have flops. You're going to have critics. But I hope no matter what, that you keep creating. You keep putting stuff out there. Because the only thing worse than something imperfect is something that doesn't exist. Thank you very much.

9:55That was John Ushai at TED Next 2024. This talk was originally published in February, 2025. Thanks for listening to our TED Talks Daily playlist, 10 Talks to Motivate You. We've got many more talks that can motivate you. So if you have the time, head on over to ted.com slash playlists to check out more curated playlists on a variety of topics. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong.

10:37This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. Thanks for listening. Thank you.

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