F*ck Perfectionism. Here's How to Win the War in Your Head and Become Unstoppable.
Perfectionism forces us to make stupid assumptions that destroy our lives.
Perfectionism quietly murders most people’s dreams.
It’s sad because they don’t even realize it. Think of it like a 2020 bat virus that infects your lungs, makes you sick, then kills you within a few weeks.
Youtuber Matt D'Avella pointed out that some people worship perfectionism and say that anyone who doesn’t just ignores the details. Rejecting perfectionism means you care about the details but you don’t let them hold you back.
You make a decision and move on. Otherwise, perfectionism forces you to never finish a task. So you just keep obsessing over the same dumb stuff and doing tailspins until you go crazy and vomit up the cornflakes you had for breakfast.
F*ck perfectionism.
Perfectionism is a war that rages in your head (some call it a mental illness). It’s an elaborate form of procrastination and it must die.
Here’s how to destroy perfectionism forever.
Build something at speed
The temptation is to be a full-time consumer.
Instead of creating you just keep listening to audiobooks and podcasts, reading books and blogs, and watching Youtube and TikTok videos.
But you never get off zero, so you die with zero.
The solution I found is to make the decision to build something and then get to work. For me, it was a library of written essays. For you, it might be to build a business or start a new sport part-time.
The key is speed.
When you move fast you get sh*t done and break things. You see life as a series of experiments rather than a string of projects that must win Nobel Prizes.
Speed defeats overthinking, procrastination, and perfectionism all in one. BOOM!
If you’re not sure how fast to go, use this mental model: build twice as fast as you think you need to. Or build three times as fast as feels comfortable.
Get rejected and fail with a smile on your face
Perfectionism has an unwritten rule: failure is not an option.
Yuck. Failure is a great option. When my startup blew up it taught me I was a selfish bastard with a huge ego. Without this failure, I’d still be a BMW jerk wearing Armani shoes and dating fake supermodels with plastic tits.
A lack of mistakes equals a lack of growth.
Most of you need to fail way more than you currently do. It’s heart-breaking for me to watch people on the sidelines avoiding failure, while the dumb-dumbs like me are in the middle of the arena taking action and falling flat on our asses while having the time of our lives.
If life is boring you need more failure. If you’ve achieved two-tenths of stuff all over the last few years then it’s a lack of failure that’s holding you back.
Once your mind believes failure is okay, everything gets easier. Once your mind believes failure is a must, then you transcend into a higher state of consciousness that’s hard to describe.
Shoot your shot more times
“Shoot your shot” is an American saying I freaking love.
It means different things to different people. I interpret it to mean taking a risk and asking for something you want (often when you haven’t quite earned it).
A dude emailed me last week and asked for 1-1 coaching for free. He thought I’d probably say no, but wanted to try it on anyway to exercise his rejection muscle.
He ended up buying something else of mine and getting a good deal because he took the risk. Sometimes you shoot your shot and don’t get what you asked for, but what you do get is often just as good, if not better.
If you don’t ask you’ll never know.
Perfectionism forces us to make assumptions like these:
“They’ll never agree to that.”
“This will never work.”
“I’m not good enough for this.”
“I have nothing of value to offer them.”
These assumptions are lies. They slowly erode your potential. Back up your beliefs with evidence by shooting your shot and making regular asks.
Get one of these self-improvement addictions
Running a business is just self-improvement in disguise.
Playing video games is just self-improvement in disguise.
Going to the gym is just self-improvement in disguise.
Writing online is just self-improvement in disguise.
Doing sport is just self-improvement in disguise.
These common tweets have become a meme.
So many goals we choose in life are just elaborate forms of giving ourselves something to improve on. The improvement is a form of personal fulfillment, and even gives us meaning – plus, there’s the dopamine reward.
When your goal is to get hooked on daily improvement, it’s hard to stay handcuffed to perfectionism.
Stop worrying about the overwhelming silence
“Nobody cares about what I do.”
This is a common belief. Of course no one gives a f*ck about your work at the start. You haven’t earned the right to attract eyeballs and attention yet.
A lack of attention doesn’t mean what you’re doing needs to be more perfect. No. Often it means you need to:
Spend more time doing it
Increase your iteration rate
Proactively promote what you do online
Get around more people doing what you eventually want to do
I wrote online for 5 years with basically zero audience. My family said I was stupid. My work colleagues made fun of me.
After the first 5 years, the next 5 years got out of control. My writing went from nobody reading it to everyone including my grandmother’s friends in the nursing home reading it.
Perfectionism makes us impatient.
We believe we should have the results now. Or worse, that we should have the results already. That’s your ego talking.
Spend more time in a flow state being creative and building cool sh*t, and less time feeling sorry for yourself and believing you should have already been given an Oscar.
Ignore the mind virus of outside opinions
Perfectionism exists because we’re secretly afraid of what people think.
If we do the thing then our work colleagues, family, and boss will judge us harshly. We’ll also attract opinions from strangers too.
We feel like we’re at war with everyone’s opinions and we try to please as many people as we can. 1) Because we’re a good, functioning member of society 2) Because we don’t want to get canceled and have everything we’ve built so far taken away.
What’s funny about #2 is that the people who’re afraid of losing everything they’ve earned so far in life often have acquired very little. They think the money and results they’ve stockpiled are worth protecting with an army inside Fort Knox.
But really, their results are so mediocre it wouldn’t matter if it was all taken away tomorrow.
Badass writer Dan Koe sums it up better than I can:
You think you're fighting other's opinions when you're just a slave to your own.
A final thought to leave you speechless
Big promise, I know!
Here’s the killer thought from a random Twitter user:
Perfectionism is waiting for the perfect moment until you die.
That’s how so many people live. They get to the end of their life and realize they’ve created nothing and are now out of time.
There is no perfect time. There is no perfect result. The solution is to embrace the imperfect, and be a degenerate failure for long enough that you learn enough wisdom to become extraordinary in your field.
Tell me about your experience with perfectionism in the comments section below, so we can all learn from you.
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Error in your headline (’you’ instead of ‘your’) shows you practise what you preach...
This resonates on so many levels … it occurs for me exactly as you described ; addiction. It feels controlling that it’s embarrassing to admit it for fear of judgement. I am suppose to be stronger , how come I can’t just overcome this , it seems very easy, but yet the paralysis sets in and there I am (without action) . I appreciate the reference to doing things at a high speed pace! I’ll give it a go today !