Sometimes when we want to do something, we want to do it perfectly. Many times this prevents us from finishing something or worse yet, getting started or trying in the first place. This is a great article on the subject. Enjoy...
The Problem with Perfection
When things were out of control in my room on Edgewood Drive, in Hudson, Massachusetts, my mom would ask me to clean up. I didn’t tidy or make my bed. I didn’t put the very obvious piles of dirty laundry in the right room or clean off my desk. I always tried to go from a messy room to operating room cleanliness in one afternoon. I didn’t merely pick up books on the floor; I dusted the shelf slowly and rearranged them by size or author name or both. I spent hours and hours on a two-foot square in my room, wanting everything to be perfect. About midway through, I would get overwhelmed at the task and give up.
My mom called me a “procrastinating perfectionist.” I would wait until the last minute and then try to do it all perfectly and at once.
And maybe you think that way too.
I see that kind of thinking sometimes at an event I hold called the Quitter Conference. The goal of the event is to help you close the gap between your day job and your dream job. But sometimes when we start chasing our dreams, it’s tempting to feel like we’ve missed some of our opportunities in life. Whether you’re seventeen or forty-seven, there’s always the temptation to think that something has “passed us by.” And when we feel a little buzz to get things going, when we feel a little momentum starting to build, it’s easy to get a touch of procrastinating perfectionism. And that tends to cripple our ability to finish.
I want us to be a generation of finishers. I want us to be a generation of people who follow through and sew the last stitch or give the final keynote or write the last chapter.
And in order to get there, we have to murder perfectionism. I was going to write, “put perfectionism to bed,” but that sounded too tender for this particular monster. Murder feels right.
How do we do that? There are a number of ways. Books like Getting Things Done by David Allen are great at helping you get organized and in motion. Magazines offer monthly tips on productivity with the least effort expended. But I tend to think that the simpler I keep my tools, the more likely I am to actually use them. And there is one idea that really changed the way I looked at perfectionism. Bumping into this truth radically rewired my ability to finish.
Here’s what I learned: “Ninety percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than one hundred percent perfect and stuck in your head.”
That’s it. I admit it’s simple. But it’s also true.
The things you create and share will always outperform the things that stay stuck in your head or your desk or your laptop. You might love the ideas you have inside you. You might be more proud of them than any other project you’ve ever put together. But if you don’t follow through with them, they don’t do much good.
The business that is open will always outsell the business that is closed.
If your goal is to change the world, you have to step out and share your work. And sometimes that means getting comfortable with A-minus work.
I learned that while working on my blog, http://www.stuffchristianslike.net/. I used to kill myself on each post. I would write and rewrite each one, trying to perfectly craft what I wanted to say. It’s so easy to misinterpret something online and I wanted my message to be clear. It was tempting to hold off on posts until they were perfect.
But 7:00am comes at the same time every morning, and people expected a post from me. Not a perfect post. A great post. If I wanted to impact someone that day, if I wanted to change the way they thought about something, I had to share what I wrote. Even if I thought it was only ninety percent done. Even if I thought a little more work could make it perfect. Because that’s the lie of perfectionism, isn’t it?
We never tell ourselves, “The land of perfect is about a year away.” We never think perfect is impossible. Perfect always glows from right around the corner. We just need a little more work, a little more time and then we can share our work with the world.
I’m afraid the land of perfect is a myth. We might feel we are skirting its borders with our dream, but the reality is that those borders don’t exist because perfect doesn’t. Your definition of perfect will not fit mine, which will not fit hers or his. You can’t catch perfect. But you can catch published. You can catch finished and shared.
That’s not an excuse to do your work half-heartedly. I want you to be excellent at passion, not just passionate. But since you’re reading this newsletter, chances are good you struggle with perfectionism much more than doing things half-heartedly. The solution to doing something lackadaisically is not difficult. Just do it better. The solution to perfectionism is tricky because, at first, it doesn’t feel like something that needs to be solved.
At first you get lauded for your “attention to detail” or “commitment to excellence.” But what a lot of people don’t see are the extra hours you’re putting in to make sure something is perfect. Perfectionism seems like a character trait sometimes, not a flaw. People don’t normally see it as the poison it is until someone burns out or has a breakdown.
I look at starting any endeavor kind of like swimming. You can read all the books you want to about swimming. You can participate in blogs about swimming and buy magazines and study videos of swimming online for hours and hours. But if you waited until you were perfect at understanding swimming before you started swimming, you might never get in the water. And you’d never learn to be a great swimmer because you have to get wet a lot first.
Quit perfect. It’s an unnecessary obstacle. Chase the idea of your dream being better finished at ninety percent than perfect and not pursued.
Jon Acuff closed the gap between his day job and his dream job when he joined the Dave Ramsey team to become a full-time author. He has contributed to CNN.com, consulted with some of the top brands in the world, speaks nationally on a variety of subjects, and is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of three books: Quitter; Gazelles, Baby Steps And 37 Other Things Dave Ramsey Taught Me About Debt; and Stuff Christians Like. He lives in Nashville, TN, with his wife and two daughters. Follow him on Twitter: @jonacuff and read his blog at http://www.jonacuff.com/blog.
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