Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

by Jon Acuff

the exercises that caused people to increase their progress dramatically were those that took the pressure off, those that did away with the crippling perfectionism that caused people to quit their goals.

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

You will not be perfect, but do you know what’s even more important than perfection? Do you know what will serve you far longer than perfectionism ever could? Moving forward imperfectly.

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

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

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.

That’s why my counselor asked me to quit reading self-help books for a while. I was OD’ing on tired tomes that only made me feel like a failure. I’d buy each new book, hoping secretly that it would be harder to follow through on than the last one, with deeper mud and more hot wires. I thought that progress had to feel that way. I thought fun didn’t count. That’s a lie. Fun not only counts, but it’s necessary if you want to beat perfectionism and get to the finish.

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

As author Jonathan Fields says, is your goal to push a failure away from yourself or pull a victory toward yourself?

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. You will never accidentally end up doing a difficult project.

Please know that the minute you pick a goal and make it fun, a new goal that’s really a hiding place will pop into your head. I don’t mean eventually, I don’t mean later, I don’t mean on Day 14. I mean on Day 1.

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.

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.

Sometimes you’re not afraid of the finish; you’re afraid of what happens after the finish.

If you’ve had a goal for a while or one that you’ve started and routinely quit, there’s a reason. You’re getting something out of not finishing. There’s a piece of cheese somewhere in this maze.

Goals you refuse to chase don’t disappear—they become ghosts that haunt you.