Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

by Jon Acuff

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.

“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.”

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.

But keep in mind that the shortcut isn’t “find something fun”; the shortcut is “make it fun if you want it done.” There’s action involved in that. You have to do the work of making it fun. How? Ask this question: “How could this goal be more fun?” Crazy, right? I know. I’m a visionary.

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

Author Jessica Turner doesn’t feel that way though. When she was going to do a Webinar for a sales team I had done a Webinar for, she called and interviewed me. I had learned a lot and made some mistakes. For instance, if you want people to show up at your Webinar, you have to e-mail them twice on the day of, three hours before and then five minutes before it starts. Did you know that? I sure didn’t, until I learned it from Lewis Howes. I tried it and it dramatically increased attendance at the next Webinar I did. I passed that on to Jessica. If you don’t have any information of your own, someone else does and will give it to you if you ask the right way.