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---
title: "My Imperfect Journal"
date: 2026-02-21T00:00:00Z
draft: false
---
If you're like me, you occasionally get the urge to trash your old projects and start over from scratch. The thinking goes "With what I know now, I could do better the next time around." Sometimes that's a good idea. Other times you're just suffering from an unhealthy unattainable desire for perfection like me.
I've spent more hours writing and rewriting text messages than I'd ever like to admit, in an effort to make them "perfect". I know it makes no sense to waste my time that way, but I still do it anyway as if I'm being graded.
The same drive that causes me to obsess over my texts has caused me to consider remaking this journal from scratch as well. There are things I'd do differently if I started over. But I'm not going to start over, because a few thoughts have convinced me that it's better to just make peace with its imperfections.
One of those thoughts is that, in 2031, future me may look back on recent entries the same way current me sees the entries I wrote back in 2021—I'll want to delete them and start over from scratch. I'd be restarting every few years, and it would still never be good enough. I'd be very put off by any other online content creator doing that, so it makes no sense to do it myself.
A big mistake I made with this journal thanks to my perfectionism was changing its domain name numerous times. It went from 0gitnick.xyz to nicksphere.com to nicksphere.ch to nicholasjohnson.ch. That's too much rebranding. It's best to just pick a decent domain and stick with it than to change it every few years because you found a better one. To have an audience, people need to know how to find you online easily. Your links can't be changing all the time.
Another thought that keeps me from giving into perfectionism is that my writing reflects my evolution over time as a person, thinker, and writer. That in and of itself is valuable, and it's one reason I prefer writing new entries rather than deleting and rewriting the old ones. It's nice to be able to see how far I've come, even if some of my old entries make me cringe.
And finally, I'm comforted by the fact that there are still plenty of improvements I can make to this journal without tearing it all down and starting over. New entries can be made better by improving my writing and including more images and videos to make the content more dynamic. I can focus more on topics readers are likely to find interesting. This journal can be made available in other languages so it reaches a wider audience. I've already begun using a grammar checker to avoid spelling errors. And none of these improvements require undoing any work I've already done.
To conclude, I'm content with this imperfect journal, and I'm going to keep working on it as is. Being five years into this project, I acknowledge that deleting everything and starting from scratch isn't a good use of my time. There will always be things I can do to improve my projects. The challenge isn't removing every imperfection. Rather, it's letting go of perfectionism so that something that is pretty good can be allowed to exist.
Thanks to all of you who read my journal, and I'm looking forward to writing many more entries this year.
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