Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

by Jon Acuff

The less that people aimed for perfect, the more productive they became.

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

Second, developing tolerance for imperfection is the key factor in turning chronic starters into consistent finishers.

Chronic starters quit the day after perfect.

Imperfection is fast, and when it arrives we usually quit. That’s why the day after perfect is so important. This is the make-or-break day for every goal. This is the day after you skipped the jog. This is the day after you failed to get up early. This is the day after you decided the serving size for a whole box of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts is one. The day after perfect is what separates finishers from starters.

the opposite of perfectionism is failure. It’s not. The opposite is finished.

When you don’t finish it, you’ve broken that promise. You’ve lied to the person you spend the most time with. You.

If you break enough promises, you start to doubt yourself.

that. 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.

When we create a goal, we aim for something better. We want to look better. We want to feel better. We want to be better. But then better turns into best. We don’t want small growth. We want massive, overnight success.

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

Day 1 isn’t the most important day of a goal. The day after perfect is, and now we’re ready for it.

You’re not as foolhardy as me, but you probably tend to overreach a bit with your goals, too. We all supersize our goals at the beginning and the reason why is simple. Perfectionism.

If you ignore this initial barrage and start something, perfectionism changes its tune completely. Now it says that you have to do it perfectly. It’s the only possibility that is acceptable.

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

At the beginning, when our excitement is through the roof, we think our achievement must be as well.

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.

My theory was that people, especially chronic starters like you and me, overestimate what they can accomplish in a set period of time. When they fail to hit the massive goal, it leads to discouragement, which results in people quitting and never finishing.

But if you’d cut the goal in half to five pounds and then lost eight, you’d be a lot more likely to continue because of your initial victory. You would have lost the same amount of weight, but one approach would have almost guaranteed that you’d finish your initial goal and try another one.

Goals are a marathon, not a sprint. I know that if I can get you to do a little one month and win, you’re more likely to do a little more the next month and win even more. In the course of a year or maybe even a lifetime that approach will always beat the kill-yourself-for-a-month approach. That tends to end one of two ways: you miss your goal and give up, or you hit your goal and are so spent that you give up.

Some goals are difficult to cut in half. For those, don’t cut them in half; give yourself more time. If you doubled the amount of time you gave yourself to pay off the debt, what’s the worst thing that would happen? You’d pay a little more in interest but you’d still pay off the whole debt. Remember, we’re up against quitting.

Those two approaches, cutting the goal in half or doubling the timeline, can be applied to most goals.

Few things demoralize a workforce like a leader who doesn’t pick the right-sized goal. If you think it’s discouraging to break a promise to yourself, imagine multiplying that discouragement by a hundred or even a thousand employees.

Let’s pretend for a minute that you cut your goal in half and instead of cleaning your entire house, you cleaned just two rooms. For years, you’ve hated how cluttered your house is and the idea of doing only two rooms doesn’t seem like enough.

Remember, at the beginning of a goal it tells you that you’ll never be able to do something. Now, it’s telling you to do it perfectly and quickly.

So, what’s the worst that would happen if you cut your goal in half or gave yourself more time? We already know the best that could happen. You’d improve your odds of success by 63 percent.

But would the world fall apart if you did less or it took longer? This idea definitely goes against every goal-setting bit of wisdom you’ve ever heard. I know that, but remember, we’re trying to do two things here: 1. Finish. 2. Beat perfectionism.

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. Perfectionism’s third lie is: You can do it all. I’m here to tell you that you can’t.

Perhaps if we sliced the day just a little differently or combined an audiobook with the treadmill while also flossing, we could manage to get it all done.

You only have two options right now. Attempt more than is humanly possible and fail. Choose what to bomb and succeed at a goal that matters. Perfectionism tells you to take option one. In this chapter, you’re going to learn how to take option two.

That’s OK. In moments like this, you do get to make a choice. You can choose shame or strategy.

That’s the truly terrible part of trying too much. You don’t just drop the bonus item and carry on with your goal. You drop every ball you’re juggling when one gets out of sync, like our would-be Ironman participant from the last chapter. When you can’t do it all, you feel ashamed and give up. Or you pick a strategy and decide in advance what things you’re going to bomb.

“Oh, that ball I put down on purpose before the game even started? Thanks for noticing!”

Most books like this stress your ability to get more done, not your need to identify things you can’t possibly get done. But adding things to your already full life doesn’t make you feel better, it just makes you feel more stressed. If you’re going to avoid the shame trap, you need to decide ahead of time which activities in your life you can be bad at.

In his book Two Awesome Hours, Josh Davis

Fun is a mortal enemy of perfectionism.

That’s a lie. Fun not only counts, but it’s necessary if you want to beat perfectionism and get to the finish.

joyless goals fail.

To have a great principle, both satisfaction and performance success

must be present. Fun is one of those approaches that checks both boxes.

The second benefit to picking something you enjoy is that it increases performance success by 46 percent. You perform better when you pick something you think is fun.

Fun isn’t optional. It’s necessary if you’re going to kill perfectionism and make it through to done.

“make it fun if you want it done.”

client motivations fall into two rough categories: Reward motivation Fear motivation

You’ll never finish anything, though, if you wait to be inspired. Instead, pick which form of motivation you need the most and then add it to as many parts of the project as possible.

As you choose between fear and a reward, please know that perfectionism will tell you that you don’t need either.

Fear motivates me to prepare my speeches but a reward encourages me to work hard at my writing.

Perfectionism is about conformity, it’s about twisting and molding your performance to some imaginary standard that’s impossible to hit. There’s no room for weird when it comes to perfectionism.