Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

by Jon Acuff

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

More than that, we will even prequit, before we’ve even begun.

That’s why a lot of people won’t start a new goal. They’d rather get a zero than a fifty.

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

The day after perfect is what separates finishers from starters.

Accomplishing a goal is a lot less like taking a train across country and a lot more like driving a bumper car.

Some readers have already felt uncomfortable with this chapter because they think the opposite of perfectionism is failure. It’s not. The opposite is finished.

Those are the doors we stand before in this book and in our lives. One is marked FINISHED and leads to untold adventures, opportunities, and stories. One is marked PERFECTIONISM and leads to a solid brick wall of frustration, shame, and incomplete hopes.

The problem is that perfectionism magnifies your mistakes and minimizes your progress.

Have you ever wondered why 92 percent of people fail at their goals? Because we tend to set goals that are foolishly optimistic. 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.” Study after study has confirmed that we are prone to fall prey to planning fallacy, but one of my favorite examples involved college seniors working on honors theses.

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.

If

taking a break from social media sounds intimidating, remember, you’ve already done this for an entire year. It was called 1997.

Everyone has heard the phrase “paralysis by analysis.” You can get stuck drawing a perfect plan and never actually get work done if you’re not careful. But more than just analysis, perfectionism offers us two distinct distractions: Hiding places Noble obstacles

If you don’t learn what makes you work best and repeat it, you’ll never get better. Think about a time when you accomplished something. What were you doing? What elements of that moment helped the most? Where were you? What music were you listening to? What did you do before? What did you do after?

Gilana Telles did a little self-evaluation the first time she went through the 30 Days of Hustle and realized she performs well with a complex system of her own personal creation. “I completed sixty-two important tasks that I otherwise would have pushed back and left for the last minute. I developed a chart to track my goals by week. I created a color-coded calendar system!” What works for her would give me a panic attack.

If you’re unhappy with your progress, you have three different dials you can adjust. The goal The timeline The actions

Just make sure that an increase in action doesn’t come with an increase in perfection.

Actions: Write down one to three things you can track concerning your goal. Review a goal from the past to see if you can learn anything. Find your airplane. What’s the way you work best? If you’re already in the middle of a goal, decide if you need to adjust your goal, timeline, or actions.

The fear of what happens next Sometimes you’re not afraid of the finish; you’re afraid of what happens after the finish. It’s one thing to complete your book. It’s another thing to have that book open to feedback from strangers on Amazon.

Boats were built for water. You’ll figure out what’s next when you get there. Don’t worry about it now.

The fear that it won’t be perfect

It won’t be perfect. It won’t. Not because you did something wrong but because life doesn’t work that way.

Life is always a little different than we expected. The colors aren’t the same as we saw them in our head. The moment unfolds with a different rhythm than we predicted. The familiar emotions we banked on are different.

Because no one knows the outcome until after. Perfectionism sure doesn’t. Bon Jovi didn’t want to put “Living on a Prayer” on his album. He didn’t like the song and thought other people wouldn’t either. History is littered with examples like this.

The fear of “what now?”

The finish line isn’t scary when you realize it’s also a starting line for the next thing. It’s not the end, it’s just a different kind of beginning.