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Remember, perfectionism will tell you that fun doesn’t count. Even worse, it will tell you that using rewards or fears as a form of motivation to reach your goal is a crutch. You’re the only one with stupid, fun, weird systems.
The more fun you add to your goal, be it in the form of fear or reward, the more likely you’ll actually finish.
Perfectionism told me I shouldn’t need the approval of other people to accomplish a goal.
I’m the guy who read more than a hundred books in 2017 because I thought a hashtag and some support from random followers was fun.
The Truth About Fun Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion. —Simon Sinek
Cut your goal in half. Choose what you’ll bomb. Make it fun if you want it done.
At the beginning of any goal, perfectionism focuses on destroying it with a full frontal attack. It tells you that if it isn’t perfect, you should quit. It says your goal isn’t big enough. It criticizes you for even thinking about making it fun. But if you hold on, if you refuse to allow perfectionism to denigrate your goal, it will completely change
tactics.
Unexpectedly, it will move from destruction ...
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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.
A hiding place is the safe place you go to hide from your fear of messing up. It’s the task that lets you get your perfectionism fix by making you feel successful even as you avoid your goal.
My wife, Jenny, calls me out on hiding places all the time. One afternoon she said, “I know you’re avoiding writing when your in-box is immaculate.”
If you’re going to finish, you have to ignore these two hiding places. Here are a few simple ways to identify them: Do you find yourself going there accidentally? If you blink and find yourself working on something besides
your real goal, you’ve probably retreated to the first kind of hiding place: the obvious time waster.
Difficult work requires discipline. The hiding places perfectionism offers don’t.
If you ever have to do a complicated, multistep explanation to say why what you’re doing is valuable, it probably isn’t. You’re probably actually camping out in the kind of hiding place that masquerades as productivity.
Is what you’re working on directly in line with what you want to finish, or is it disconnected by a few steps that take some creativity to explain?
Ask someone close to you if you’re spending time, energy, or money on something that’s not important to your goals—and don’t listen to perfectionism
when it tells you not to do this. Perfectionism loves isolation.
It would prefer you go it alone, convincing you that relying on...
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Energy is a little more difficult to measure, but is just as expensive as time.
Don’t spend your energy on hiding places if you can help it.
If something is stealing from any of those reserves, be careful. The flip side is that some things aren’t distractions, they’re commitments.
But that project that you always work on rather than move toward your dreams? Those hours spent doing X instead of what really matters? It’s time to recognize that the peace hiding places give you is a false one. They don’t protect you—instead, they keep you from reaching your goals. It’s time to recognize hiding places for the perfectionism trap they are and to step out into the light.
You are never more creative for new ideas than when you are almost done with an old one. “What’s next” will always look more interesting than “what’s now.”
Instead of feeling shame and trying to ignore that project, I placed it directly after the finish line for this book. I didn’t say never; I said later.
Want to create a reward you really love? When new ideas or new goals get shiny, put them at the finish line. Don’t try to grow callous to the shiny objects; if anything, let them gleam. Let them be brighter than the noonday sun. Just make sure they point the way to the finish line. No podcast until the book is done. No other diet until you’ve finished the one you already committed to. No other small business idea until you’ve completed the original one. Line your finish line with the dream goals you’re currently using as hiding places and then watch how fast you’ll run toward it.
Perfectionism will tell you, “If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.” And when we leave the idea of “right” undefined, it tends to get complicated, usually in one of two ways.
In the first kind of noble obstacle, perfectionism sneakily tells you that you cannot move toward your goal until you do something else: “I can’t do X until Y.” In the second kind, perfectionism tells you that reaching your goal could actually produce bad results or make you a bad person.
They’re not avoiding the business, they’re protecting the sanctity of the marriage. How noble.
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.
Writing a fantasy basketball newsletter instead of writing a business book is a hiding place.
Deciding that you can’t write your book until you’ve read the top one hundred business books of all time is a noble obstacle.
Bill and his wife haven’t had a garage sale once in the twenty years they’ve been married. He’s never wanted to have one. He doesn’t go to them on the weekends. He never even mentioned the idea until he was pushed ...
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What was a one-step goal—clean garage—turned into a sixteen-step project. Is it any wonder this noble obstacle will ensure that Bill never actually does anything with the garage?
These guys are deploying the second kind of noble obstacle. Instead of saying “until,” they say, “if . . . then.” They claim that if they pursue their goal something bad will happen. Maybe the finish will turn them into a monster. Maybe they will turn into a bad person.
You know you’re employing an “if . . . then” noble obstacle if you are only offering yourself two extreme options. Either you don’t work out at all or you lose so much weight you have to buy new jeans and constantly take photos standing in your old ones with the waist
pulled out to show your progress.
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.
I didn’t want things to get easier, which is unfortunate, because that is exactly what finishers focus on.
Sometimes stacking the odds is simply putting out your workout clothes the night before because at 6 A.M., you are a jerk and you will quit if you can’t find socks easily in the dark.
Perfectionism always makes things harder and more complicated. Finishers make things easier and simpler.
The next time you work on a goal, I dare you to ask the following questions during the middle of the project: Could things be easier? Could things be simpler?
Perfectionism will tell you that you’ve spent so long in a hiding place that there’s no more time. You’ve missed some magical window. Your opportunity is gone. The chance has passed. Ridiculous.
The show was called ER. The writers who created it almost two decades before it aired were Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame and Steven Spielberg of everything. Nineteen years is an awful long time to sit on a shelf. I don’t know how long you’ve been hiding from your goal. Maybe it’s nineteen days or nineteen years, the exact time doesn’t really matter; the result is still the same.
Goals are simple but they are not easy. You must leave your hiding places. You have to abandon your noble obstacles. And in perhaps the strangest way to end a chapter, you better get ready to kill some birds.
At the core, perfectionism is a desperate attempt to live up to impossible standards. We wouldn’t play if we knew the whole game was impossible, so perfectionism promises us that we just need to follow some secret rules. As long as we do that, perfect is possible. So over the years, as you chase goals, perfectionism quietly adds some secret rules to your life.
One of mine is “If it doesn’t come easily, it’s not worth doing.” Another way to say it is “If you have to learn something new, you’re failing.”
Another secret rule I live my life by is “Success is bad.” My dad is a pastor and I grew up on the outside of money. I remember him telling me a number of times that if anyone ever gave him a nice luxury car, he would give it back.
