Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

by Jon Acuff

Once the streak is broken, I can’t pick it back up. My record is no longer perfect so I quit altogether. This is a surprisingly common reaction to mistakes.

This is the first lie that perfectionism tells you about goals: Quit if it isn’t perfect.

If you quit enough times, quitting is no longer just a possibility when you start a new goal, it’s your identity, and that feels terrible.

The problem is that perfectionism magnifies your mistakes and minimizes your progress. It does not believe in incremental success. Perfectionism portrays your goal as a house of cards. If one thing doesn’t go perfectly, the whole thing falls apart. The smallest misstep means the entire goal is ruined.

The harder you try to be perfect, the less likely you’ll accomplish your goals.

We’ve now bumped into the second lie of perfectionism: Your goal should be bigger.

Scientists call this “planning fallacy,” a concept first studied by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They described this problem as “a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed.”

“I had eight months to train so I went to work on planning out my regimen. I was already going to the gym every weekday so it would be easy to spend more time on running/swimming/biking than on lifting, right? I planned it out, had it all ready to go. And never went to the gym again.” What’s amazing about that is the goal wrecked what he was already doing. Before that massive goal showed up, he was consistently going to the gym. Not only did he not do the race, he quit everything that was already in motion. That’s how powerfully destructive a wrong-sized goal is.

The only way to accomplish a new goal is to feed it your most valuable resource: time. And what we never like to admit is that you don’t just give time to something, you take it from something else. To be good at one thing you have to be bad at something else.

In his book Two Awesome Hours, Josh Davis calls this strategic incompetence. Strategic incompetence is the act of deciding ahead of time that you don’t care about your yard. It’s admitting you don’t have time to do everything and something will deliberately go by the wayside during this season of your life.

As I started to work on my goals more aggressively, here are four things I chose to bomb: Keeping up with TV conversations I have not watched Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, or The Walking Dead. There were sixty-two episodes of Breaking Bad, representing 42 minutes of content each. That’s a total of 2,604 minutes, or 43 hours. That’s ninety-six different 30-minute sessions you could have hustled on a goal. My friend told me he watches the entire previous season of a show before a new season starts. Every new twenty-show season really represents forty episodes to watch. I’m not against TV, and love the show This Is Us because I like weeping, but I can’t keep up with it and with my goals. So at dinner parties when people rattle off details about popular shows I look like a huge dork and will instead make comments about Seinfeld. Is that wrong? Should I not do that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing. I’m OK with that. I’ve decided to stink at TV. Snapchat Perhaps by the time this book comes out I’ll be amazing at Snapchat, and will be able to deftly apply puppy ears to photos of me eating lunch, but I doubt it. I have friends who keep trying to get me on it, but when I ask why, their only answer is, “Because everybody is doing it.” That’s the same logic that got fifty million Nickelback albums sold. People who post twenty times a day are kidding themselves when they pretend they can do long-form thought while also being interrupted constantly to let people know...

And remember, if someone gets mad at you for saying no, they just confirmed you were supposed to say that in the first place.

Regardless of the type of goal, my belief that goals must be difficult and joyless will wreck me at every turn. Many of us do this. We crave challenges that make us miserable, which is why adventure races are so popular right now. When the Tough Mudder race initially started, one of the obstacles you had to navigate was a field of live electrical wires. You spend your entire life trying to prevent your skin from ever touching a live wire, but on Tough Mudder day, you pay for that experience. When I was eight, I tried to press the coin return button on a Skee-Ball machine at Chuck E. Cheese’s. The button was missing and instead of getting my token back, my finger touched an open wire. It felt like my entire hand was getting chewed up by a meat grinder made of fire and wasps. That’s the sensation you pay for at Tough Mudder.

Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion. —Simon Sinek

At the beginning of any goal, perfectionism focuses on destroying it with a full frontal attack.

The closer you get to finishing, the more interesting everything else in your life becomes. It’s as if you’ve put on distraction goggles. Things you never noticed pop up and dance tantalizingly across your vision. “Wouldn’t it be better to organize your bookshelf than finish that project?

But more than just analysis, perfectionism offers us two distinct distractions: Hiding places Noble obstacles A hiding place is an activity you focus on instead of your goal. A noble obstacle is a virtuous-sounding reason for not working toward a finish. Both are toxic to your ability to finish.

anyone who has struggled with hiding places knows, one of the best ways to fall in love with a new goal is to just try to finish an old one.

At the heart of it, a noble obstacle is an attempt to make your goal harder than it has to be so you don’t have to finish, but can still look respectable.

The second you hear the word “until” pop into your mouth, spit it out like Brussels sprouts that have been served without bacon. You can always tell how gross a vegetable is by how much bacon has to be added to it to do all the heavy lifting.

Remember, perfectionism has no sense of gray, things are only black or white. You do it perfectly or you don’t do it at all.

Are you overfocusing on your kids because you’re afraid to admit your goals matter, too?

We become adult toddlers when we refuse help from people and believe the lie that seeking assistance is a sign of weakness.

As he entered her room at the nursing home, Grandma Betsy looked up from her book and announced simply, “Well, Jason got fat.” Old people and little kids tell the truth. We only act polite in between.