When learning things, perfectionism can be your enemy.
I’ve mentioned before that I have weekly Japanese conversation practice via italki, and how I found this to a great help when I finally went to Japan.
More than improving my Japanese itself though, which it certainly did, it got me used to speaking despite my Japanese not being perfect.
Realistically, when you’re learning a language, you’re going to be varying degrees of bad for a very long time. So if you want to speak, you’re pretty much going to have to it in spite of this fact, and getting over those feelings of shame or hesitation is a skill in and of itself!
I feel that this sort of harmful perfectionism actually applies to learning things in general.
For instance, I recently tried building something, not out of code like I normally do, but out of wood and screws and other real-world materials.
I’m not used to doing this, so I made a lot of mistakes, some of which cost time and materials to undo, others that I just had to accept and build around.
It’s very easy for me to feel frustrated and beat myself up over this, especially when I wasted that time and those materials.
But it struck me that, like with speaking languages, I’ll not get better at this unless I let go of my perfectionism, do what I can with my current skill level and accept the results.
Adventures in Language Self-Study 