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Perfectionism

Don’t Over-Deliver

November 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Don't Over-Deliver: Decide To Be Better Many tasks in the workplace could be done with total adequacy and barely more.

Don’t get fixated on ensuring that every task is entirely done, every email edited and re-edited to get the grammar right, or every spreadsheet is flawless. This is a pointless pursuit.

Sure, you don’t want to be a careless hammerhead. But don’t waste time sweating the little stuff. There comes the point where any changes you make to whatever it is you’re working on no longer makes it better but just different. Identifying the inflection point of diminishing returns is one of the hardest skills to learn and one of the most necessary.

Don’t agonize over tiny improvements in your work and thwart yourself from achieving the actual goal of doing the work.

Idea for Impact: Most acceptable outcomes correlate with “good enough,” not “perfection.” Being consistently excellent is essentially a matter of fierce discipline—doing the essential things well.

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  3. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’
  4. The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’
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Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Balance, Getting Things Done, Goals, Perfectionism, Procrastination

Get Good At Things By Being Bad First

May 2, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

You Have to Be Bad at Something Before You are Good at it

Your first attempts are going to be bad

A technique used by many a brilliant inventor:

  • Make something. Get it functional. Get it adequate. It’s okay if it’s subpar.
  • Then, stumble around. Iterate until it’s good.

Now, that’s a better creative process than making something good on the first go.

Start, even if you’re bad at it

Case in point: Write bad first drafts quickly. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. Let it all pour out. Let it romp all over the place. No one’s going to see it. You can shape it up later. You can gradually polish the thought flow and enrich the choice of words.

If you aren’t willing to be bad initially, you’ll never get started on anything new.

The way you create something good is by launching into it and then iterating gradually rather than by going into your cave and trying to create that perfect masterpiece.

Essentially, this is agile development. The best programmers write functional code to prove some concept. Along the way, they’ll get a better understanding of the business need for the software and the workflow. Bit by bit, they rework snippets of code and improve continuously.

Idea for Impact: Just start. Do a bad first job.

The bad is the precursor to the good. Bad will get you started. It’ll move you forward. Pressing on, you’ll get illuminated, enlightened, and informed.

Momentum is everything. Don’t put off any contemplated task thinking, “This is hard. I don’t know how to do this well. I’m going to have to do it perfectly. Or I need to wait till I have enough time.” The instant you stop cold and put something off, momentum starts the other way.

Motivation is often the result of an action, not its cause. Taking action—even in small, sloppy ways—naturally produces momentum. It’s a better solution than trying to do it right the first time.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Doing Is Everything
  3. This New Year, Forget Resolutions, Set Intentions Instead
  4. Everything Takes Longer Than Anticipated: Hofstadter’s Law [Mental Models]
  5. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

Filed Under: Mental Models, Project Management, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Decision-Making, Discipline, Fear, Goals, Lifehacks, Motivation, Perfectionism, Procrastination, Thought Process

Just Start

February 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Overcome Procrastination

Procrastination is a chronic habit. Many of us procrastinate to give ourselves fleeting comfort from our dread of starting a task.

One way to overcome inertia and overcome procrastination: whether it’s studying, exercising, writing, or whatever, just start. Cut out the distractions. Divide your workload down into manageable, bite-sized fragments. Just start.

When you find yourself procrastinating, tell yourself to “just start”—over and over if needed—until you convince yourself to work on the task. No more fumbling around.

'Overcoming Procrastination' by Patrick King (ISBN 171885112X) Often, just beginning the task can positively shift your motivation. The thing with procrastinating is that you think a task is harder than it is, so you avoid starting it. The task isn’t really that hard most of the time, but you just think it is.

Even minimal progress toward a goal lets you feel more optimistic about the objective and ourselves. Typically, once you commit to a task and build momentum, you’ll discover it’s not as “hard” as you’d anticipated. From there, your disposition snowballs, and one task leads to another, which leads to another. Indeed, objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Idea for Impact: Don’t wait to start that daunting task. Remember, you don’t have to like it to do it. Take one small step now to get the ball rolling down the hill toward completion.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Five Ways … You Could Stop Procrastinating
  2. How to Banish Your Inner Perfectionist
  3. Focus on Achieving Your Highest Priorities
  4. How to … Make Work Less Boring
  5. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress [Mental Models]

Filed Under: Health and Well-being, Mental Models Tagged With: Discipline, Fear, Getting Things Done, Motivation, Perfectionism, Procrastination, Stress, Time Management

A Key to Changing Your Perfectionist Mindset

January 14, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

It’s okay to have some clutter and untidiness occasionally.

A Key to Changing Your Perfectionist Mindset Sometimes, look away when the kids scatter crumbs or toys are strewn all over the house. Instead of spending an afternoon swiffering, vacuuming, scrubbing, and polishing, just play with your kids.

Let yourself off for not getting all the chores done or keeping a flawlessly curated, Instagramable home. If you have guests coming over, stop agonizing and embrace a tidy-enough household. No need to live for your dinner guests—your home doesn’t always have to look the way you want.

Idea for Impact: Train yourself to care less. Yeah, really.

Perfectionism is a wicked way to live life. Look for ways to reach your goals without being perfect.

Setting unrealistic expectations only makes you vulnerable to emotional difficulties. That’s what perfectionism does. Perfection is holding yourself to a paradigm wherein anything less than “perfect” is, in one way or another, failure.

Think about how much more productive you could be if you stop carrying the weight of excessive expectations on your shoulders.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Dear Hoarder, Learn to Let Go
  3. Change Your Perfectionist Mindset (And Be Happier!) This Holiday Season
  4. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost
  5. Elevate Timing from Art to Science // Book Summary of Daniel Pink’s ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Anxiety, Clutter, Perfectionism, Procrastination, Simple Living, Stress, Tardiness

Why is Task-Planning so Time-Consuming?

January 10, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Planning, which saves time, itself can take quite a bit of time. It’s an interesting quasi-paradox that I’m sure you’ve run into.

Why is Task-Planning so Time-Consuming? That planning is long-drawn-out is one of the main criticisms of even the supposedly solid task-management systems out there. Take David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach, for example. Achieving the system’s potential fully is simply overwhelming. Allen’s method focuses more on the capturing, reviewing, and planning of tasks than it does on the actual doing them.

The key to time management is awareness. Think realistically about your time by recognizing it is a limited resource. Always ask yourself, even when you’re planning your time out, “Is this time-effective?”

Don’t over-organize your list. Don’t spend too much time making it look nice. Don’t feel like you need to do everything on your list. Don’t put anything on your list when you’d be wiser to just do the task now and save the time it takes to put it on your list and think about it again later.

Idea for Impact: Refine your planning approach further. Remember, the benefits of any tool must exceed its costs.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. A Key to Changing Your Perfectionist Mindset
  2. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost
  3. Change Your Perfectionist Mindset (And Be Happier!) This Holiday Season
  4. Lessons from the Princeton Seminary Experiment: People in a Rush are Less Likely to Help Others (and Themselves)
  5. How Stress Impairs Your Problem-Solving Capabilities: Case Study of TransAsia Flight 235

Filed Under: Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Anxiety, Perfectionism, Procrastination, Stress, Task Management, Thought Process

The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

January 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Even the more determined souls among us find that New Year’s resolutions aren’t effective.

Some of us don’t even bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore because we always break them. Mark Twain famously wrote in a letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in January 1863,

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual … New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.

The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

When we try to change everything at once, we set ourselves up for failure

We make bold resolutions to start exercising or losing weight, for example, without taking the steps needed to set ourselves up for success. Behavioral scientists who study habit formation argue that most people try to create healthy habits in the wrong way. Starting a new routine isn’t always easy.

Stanford University researcher B. J. Fogg, the author of Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019,) notes that jumping cold turkey into new beginnings upon the turn of the calendar demands a high level of motivation that can’t be sustained over time. He recommends starting with tiny habits to help make the new habit as easy and achievable as possible in the beginning.

Small Measures, Large Results

'Tiny Habits' by BJ Fogg (ISBN 0358362776) Small, specific goals are amazingly effective. Making a New Year’s resolution to “run a marathon this summer” is an imposing aspiration to get started on, but committing to “run two miles in 30 minutes thrice a week in January” is a first operating objective.

Break any big challenge into simple steps and just focus on getting to the first step. Taking a daily short stroll could be the beginning of an exercise habit. Then, regroup and think about step two.

The truth is, if you invest time and have even a little bit of success in any endeavor, you’re both more likely to believe the changes will last and commit more. Success builds momentum.

Idea for Impact: Good habits happen when we set ourselves up for achievable success.

Bold promises and vague goals don’t work well. Neither does beating up on yourself for lapses.

Make New Year’s resolutions by establishing long-term targets and making many small resolutions all year round. If you want to lose weight, resolve to pass up nacho-and-cheese and soda for a month.

Take one baby step at a time. Expect some setbacks. The willpower necessary will be small. And you’ll get better results that’ll actually stick.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’
  2. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  3. Half-Size Your Goals
  4. How to Banish Your Inner Perfectionist
  5. Real Ways to Make New Habits Stick

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Change Management, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Goals, Lifehacks, Perfectionism, Procrastination, Targets

Change Your Perfectionist Mindset (And Be Happier!) This Holiday Season

November 25, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Perfectionism can inspire you to deliver top-quality work, but it’ll cause needless anxiety and slow you down, especially over the holiday season.

Even for the more fastidious among us, a spotless home isn’t always achievable. Everywhere you look, there’ll be something to straighten up—unfolded laundry, kids’ toys on the floor, piles of unopened mail.

Change Your Perfectionist Mindset This Holiday Season Embrace the mess. Recognize that not all will get done on time. Tolerate some clutter from time to time and excuse yourself for not getting all the chores done or having a perfect home. Cleaning a stuffed animal or two can wait until later.

Don’t cling to your perfectionism even when it’s counterproductive. Put things away when you’re able to, but don’t feel like you have to dedicate many hours to tidy up, especially when that time can be better spent relaxing and rejoicing with family.

Idea for Impact: Now is a good time you cut yourself a break. There’s no need to feel less-than-great about the state of your home over the holidays.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. A Key to Changing Your Perfectionist Mindset
  2. Thinking Straight in the Age of Overload // Book Summary of Daniel Levitin’s ‘The Organized Mind’
  3. Dear Hoarder, Learn to Let Go
  4. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost
  5. Mottainai: The Japanese Idea That’s Bringing More Balance to Busy Lives Everywhere

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Anxiety, Clutter, Discipline, Perfectionism, Procrastination, Simple Living

Mottainai: The Japanese Idea That’s Bringing More Balance to Busy Lives Everywhere

June 7, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

You don’t have to be a Japanophile like me to be familiarized with the notion of Mottainai. Take a brief trip to Japan and observe the culture, and you’ll become acquainted with the expression that’s deeply embedded in the way of life there. Depending on the context, you’ll hear mottainai as either the admonition “don’t waste” or the assertion “too precious to waste,” when, say, you spill rice.

In recent times, conservationists such as Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai have applied that phrase to inspire humankind to reduce, repurpose, reuse, and recycle. “If we are wise like nature, we would practise the mottainai spirit. The earth practises mottainai. It reuses and recycles. We even get recycled when we die. We go back into the soil,” Maathai has said.

What the Japanese Can Teach Us About Cleanliness

Mottainai: What the Japanese Can Teach Us About Cleanliness Over in Japan, tidying up is a bee on the bonnet. Cleanliness is a moral virtue, and cleaning is an act of spiritual practice—indeed, a means to purify the soul. In Shinto, good spirits can dwell in clean environments, and you’ll frequently observe Japanese people cleaning their homes and offices.

Ever since the post-war reconstruction, the Japanese have also encouraged upkeep and conservation. They tend to make the most of limited resources and avoid wastefulness. Their culture dissuades the idea of trashing things.

Moreover, the concept of animism in Shinto encourages reverence for objects—from teapots to katana. There’s even an old Japanese parable about a spirit ghost named “Mottainai Obake” who haunts children who treat things wastefully.

Inner Peace Starts with the Cleanness of Our Inner and Outer World.

Knackered for the physical space, the Japanese are devoted to efficient household goods and gift-giving (albeit with lavish gift-wrapping.) Their zeal for getting organized has led to a cottage industry of clutter counselors and storage experts who’re celebrated in television shows and consumer magazines as out-and-out innovators.

'The Art of Discarding' by Nagisa Tatsumi (ISBN 0316558923) In this cultural context, Nagisa Tatsumi’s 2003 book Suteru Gijyutsu (“The Art of Throwing Away”) caused a national sensation with its bold proposal. Tatsumi challenged the Japanese to rethink their attitude to possessing things and to have the courage and conviction to get rid of all the stuff they really don’t need.

Tatsumi goaded people to let go of the things that are tying them down:

Possessing things is not good in itself. We have to consider whether they’re necessary, whether they’re used. And if something’s unnecessary, we should get rid of it. This is the essence of the Art of Discarding. Once you appreciate that you don’t have to keep what’s unnecessary, you’ll be better able to use what is necessary with proper care.

Tatsumi’s book sold 1 million copies in six months and quickly got translated into Korean and Chinese. Indeed, it was the book that inspired Marie Kondo, the reigning queen of decluttering.

Tatsumi’s Book Inspired the Current Obsession with Decluttering

In Suteru Gijyutsu, Tatsumi cheerfully explores the many psychological snags that make people reluctant to discard things.

Take the “keep it for now” syndrome, such as with the advertising leaflets that used to be inserted in the weekend newspaper. Tatsumi advises, “You think, ‘There may be something on sale that I might find useful. But I am too busy to go through them now. So I am going to keep them for now and look at them later.'” That mindset merely contributes to the piles of garbage.

Recommendation: Skim Suteru Gijyutsu, written in 2003. It was translated as The Art of Throwing Away only in 2017, a year before Tatsumi’s death.

Tatsumi’s message is simple yet profound. She guardedly reminds readers of the stark reality that everything is a waste. No matter what you buy, no matter how much you use it, no matter how much you love it, no matter if you keep it or recycle it or donate it … it’s still waste. It will still end up in a landfill someday. By learning to discard, you will reclaim space, free yourself from “accumulation syndrome,” and pave the way to rediscovering joy and purpose in a less-cluttered life.

Idea for Impact: Take back control, gain space, free yourself from “accumulation syndrome,” and find new joy and purpose in your less-cluttered life Take Tatsumi’s motto to heart: “If you have it, use it. If you don’t use it, don’t have it.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Marie Kondo is No Cure for Our Wasteful and Over-consuming Culture
  2. The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’
  3. I’ll Be Happy When …
  4. Change Your Perfectionist Mindset (And Be Happier!) This Holiday Season
  5. Thinking Straight in the Age of Overload // Book Summary of Daniel Levitin’s ‘The Organized Mind’

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Clutter, Discipline, Japan, Materialism, Mindfulness, Perfectionism, Philosophy, Simple Living

Perfect—Or Perfectly Miserable?

May 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How Mandy Patinkin Overcame Perfectionism The American actor Mandy Patinkin has a reputation as a “self-oriented” perfectionist. He’s one of those who impose exacting standards on themselves and engage in rigorous self-evaluation.

In this interview for The New Yorker, Patinkin reveals how he overcame this tendency:

My children watched me be too hard on myself for years. They’d come to performances, concerts. Then they’d hear their father criticizing it afterwards. One day, my son Gideon and I are walking down the street on the Upper West Side and he wants to talk about his life. He’s talking about bad nights, good nights, et cetera. And he says, “I watched you suffer for so many years over things that I could never understand what you were suffering about, because I was there and I saw it and it was great. I watched you suffering, and I learned that it was meaningless, that it had no worth, it was for nothing.” And I started to weep. My sons knew that it was never worth it.

Idea for Impact: If you tend to fixate on undue self-standards, ask yourself, “To what end?” Recalibrate your expectations. Don’t let your perfectionist tendencies hold you back.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Banish Your Inner Perfectionist
  2. The Gift of the Present Moment
  3. Mottainai: The Japanese Idea That’s Bringing More Balance to Busy Lives Everywhere
  4. Your To-Do List Isn’t a Wish List: Add to It Selectively
  5. The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Discipline, Likeability, Mindfulness, Motivation, Perfectionism, Psychology

Why You Should Celebrate Small Wins

May 18, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Small steps are more manageable than big, daunting ones. Small wins aren’t just a great way to make progress. They’re good for your emotional well-being too.

'Little Bets' by Peter Sims (ISBN 1439170428) Peter Sims writes in Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries (2013,)

Small wins are like footholds or building blocks amid the inevitable uncertainty of moving forward, or as the case may be, laterally. They serve as what Saras Sarasvathy calls landmarks, and they can either confirm that we’re heading in the right direction or they can act as pivot points, telling us how to change course.

In the acclaimed paper in which [University of Michigan psychologist Karl] Weick described small wins, published in the January 1984 issue of American Psychologist, he used the example of how helpful it is for alcoholics to focus on remaining sober one day at a time, or even one hour at a time. Stringing together successive days of sobriety helps them to see the rewards of abstinence and makes it more achievable in their minds. Elaborating on the benefits of small wins, Weick writes, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

Each time you accomplish a small step, have a little voice whisper in your ear, “You accomplished more than you had ten minutes ago!” This affirmation can help you recognize the momentum you’ve created and stimulate you to get absorbed in more of the task. By the end of the hour or the day, you’ll feel like you’ve had multiple wins on your way towards the larger goal.

A big hurdle to change is the resistance from believing that the pain of attempting major change is too rarely worth it. But researchers believe that any accomplishment, no matter how small, activates your brain’s reward circuitry, releasing dopamine, the pleasure hormone. That can evoke the motivational appeal of an outcome, which in turn can hook you toward achieving even more.

Keep sight of the small victories. Those are the ones that keep you going. If you’re a manager, celebrate even ordinary, incremental progress—that’ll improve your team’s engagement.

Idea for Impact: Celebrate your small wins—it’ll make you feel good about yourself. Attention to small wins can help people lift themselves out of fear and hopelessness—this is the crux of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT.)

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year
  2. Real Ways to Make New Habits Stick
  3. Do You Really Need More Willpower?
  4. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost
  5. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

Filed Under: Managing People, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Change Management, Discipline, Goals, Motivation, Perfectionism, Persuasion, Procrastination, Time Management

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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