Aiming for perfection sounds good in theory. In practice, though, it’s usually a disaster.
There are loads of tips and ‘hacks’ out there these days for anything you want to do in life.
But this brings its own problems…
You’ve now got so many little levers and dials you can pull to get better results. So it’s tempting to want to keep tinkering until you find the perfect setup.
The danger is that you never get started.
It’s easy to get paralysed by the thought of so many different tools and insights — and the infinite different ways you could combine them. Or to feel that it’s not worth taking action until you’ve fixed on the “perfect” setup.
However, the way to get the results you want is to actually do the thing. And do it continuously over a sustained period.
The ‘good enough’ approach that you implement now will easily beat the ‘perfect’ approach you’re tempted to design… that you’ll work on for months before you eventually feel it’s ready to start.
You don’t even need to know what ‘perfect’ looks like before you get started. As E. L. Doctorow said of writing (but it applies to much more): “[It’s] like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
So start your trip today.
And keep going until you reach your destination. Don’t stop and completely redesign everything any time a shiny new idea comes along.
And definitely don’t get wedded to the need to create some huge and amazingly complicated system… Then end up doing nothing because it’s simply too much.
Much better to have something simple, good, and manageable.
You can always test adding more later. But start with something you can do now. And make it something you can maintain.
More than that, know that every person and every situation is unique. So there’s no one ‘answer’ out there that is ideal for everyone.
The only way to find your ideal approach is to test what actually works for you.
You can’t steer a parked car. You’ve got to be doing something in order to test what works, what you love, and what is easy for you to stick with.
Accept that you’ll inevitably get some things totally wrong at the start. You need to give it a go, fail, notice, and course correct as you go in order to end up where you need to be.
So the aim is not to get perfect so you can get started. Getting started is itself the route towards ‘perfection’.
Then, feel your way along.
Celebrate the good things you’re already doing. Look out for new ideas and possible improvements, for sure. But bring them in gradually and intentionally.