Don't Let Perfect Be The Enemy Of Progress

Perfection can become procrastination in disguise.

In this talk, I use the analogy of writing a book to explore that idea. You could spend forever rewriting the first sentence, tweaking the first page, trying to make it flawless… but if you never move forward, the book never gets written, and neither does the next one.

Transcript

So the quote or the saying, Don't let perfect be the enemy of progress, Or don't let perfect be the enemy of good, Is something that I've found deep resonance with. It's a way of reframing your own perfection complex, A way of reframing how you operate in the world. There is this temptation, For example, As an author to rewrite the first page or the first sentence over and over and over again, To make it perfect. And you could, You could choose to do that. I've written, I don't know, 17 plus books, And I could still be writing that first book, I could still be writing that first page, That first sentence, That first word, Right? And it could be really perfect. But if I had have done that, I would not be where I am now, Millions of words in and lots of different experiences. Don't let perfect be the enemy of progress. The fact that I was able to accept imperfection allowed me to continue. And the same is true for everything I do. Teaching and offering meditations, My own inner practices, Everything. If you aim for perfection, You for a start can't get it, It's an impossible goal, Something to like, You know, Constantly be striving for. But if you realize that it's like, Okay, We've got to keep going, It's a dualistic sort of dialectic process. But also there is something to be said about progress causing perfection. So what I mean by that, If we go back to the book analogy, The fact that I've written many, Many, Many more books, And millions of words, And all of these sort of things since that first page, Gives me much broader and experience and able to then look back if I chose to, And go back to that book, Back to that first page, Back to that first line, And fix it and make it more perfect. Because now I have more experience that I wouldn't have got. And if I stayed stuck in that first moment, I had a friend years ago, Who was starting a business. And they got stuck on the logo of all things. They spent so long perfecting the logo, That the flame and desire to do the business just fizzled. It took them six months, Some ridiculous amount of time to be okay with it. And then by then the energy was gone, The life of the project was gone. And inevitably, They never executed on the business. A better approach would have been to get everything to 20%. Okay, This is a 20% good enough logo, 20% good enough product, 20% good enough business structure, 20% good enough legal work, All of the different aspects of the business. Get it all to 20% and start. 20% sounds like a low bar, And it is, Don't get me wrong. But once you're starting, You'll see all of the moving parts and the things you need to do. And then you go, Okay, That logo really isn't pulling its weight. Let's up that. Ooh, I forgot insurance. I really got to get that. Oh, Okay, The product actually isn't 20%. It's actually 80%, Like it's locked in. Good. We can ignore that for the moment and not do these minute tweaks because that would be a waste of time. Oh, Actually, I realized that my marketing is at 5% and people actually don't know about me and don't care. I need to up my marketing significantly, Et cetera, Et cetera, Et cetera. The idea is that a rising tide rises all ships, Whatever the saying is there. If you focus on any one part to perfection, The rest fall away. You have no business. You build it all up at once. And once again, The same thing with the book. If I was to write one page and not have the rest of the book, I've got a page. But if I was writing the entirety of the book, Good enough, And then come back to it in editing, Then redo it, Then I can get it closer. But at some stage, You've got to accept, Everyone has to accept that you will not get perfect. That is a goal to work towards, Something to strive towards, But it's something that you will never quite at all achieve. And the act of achieving it will stop progress, But we continue moving towards it. So we're holding two truths in our hand at once. I'm aiming for perfection, But I know that it's an impossible task. So I'll persist anyway.