Talks to Motivate You Playlist (3/10): Is perfectionism just procrastination in disguise? | Jon Youshaei
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What separates struggling artists from successful ones? Looking to creative geniuses like Mozart, Edison and Monet, video creator Jon Youshaei explains why aiming to be prolific — despite flops and failures along the way — is the key to unlocking your creative success.
This episode originally aired in 2025.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey 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 Hugh. 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, |
| 0:23.9 | to keep you going when things are hard, to inspire you as the weather shifts, to help kickstart that |
| 0:28.9 | new project or idea, or if things are feeling good for you right now, just to offer a different |
| 0:33.4 | perspective. Whatever type of motivation you might need, we have a TED talk for that. |
| 0:39.3 | Next up in our motivation playlist, when I was first starting out in journalism, I remember |
| 0:44.8 | editors saying, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. That is, sometimes you have to stop |
| 0:51.1 | tinkering and just ship a product or release the story in order to get it out on deadline. |
| 0:57.0 | In this talk from 2024, video creator John Ushae shares how he battled perfectionism when it came to his digital creations |
| 1:04.4 | and sheds light on how he found a way to push through and overcome it to create an authentic online presence and build community. |
| 1:11.9 | That's coming up right after a short break. |
| 1:26.1 | And now our TED Talk of the day. |
| 1:28.3 | I have a confession. |
| 1:31.3 | 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. |
| 1:40.3 | I finish my video and I go to save it as final. |
| 1:45.0 | But then I noticed that I could trim off a few parts of it and make it even better, |
| 1:48.0 | so I resave that file as final underscore final. |
| 1:52.0 | But then I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, I can make the audio a bit better, |
| 1:55.0 | I can make the color more saturated. |
| 1:57.0 | Let me resave it as final, but actually. |
| 2:00.0 | And then I repeat this process 29 more times until I say 29 |
| 2:04.5 | more versions of the same damn video until sometimes I honestly still don't upload it because |
| 2:12.6 | it's still not good enough. My obsession with perfection got so bad that in my first year on YouTube, I only uploaded six videos. |
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