Perfectionism

Why Your Hobbies Don’t Need to Be Perfect

May 18, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In a captivating op-ed, Columbia law professor Tim Wu explores how the pursuit of perfection has infiltrated and corrupted the realm of leisure.

If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following.

Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it … alien values like “the pursuit of excellence” have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur.

The demands of modern life and the pressure to be constantly productive have turned hobbies into serious endeavors. The pursuit of excellence, Wu argues, is at odds with true freedom and can lead to feelings of self-judgment and inadequacy. “Demanding excellence in all that we do steals from us one of life’s greatest rewards—the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy.”

Idea for Impact: Abandon the desire to excel and fully embrace the pure delight that hobbies bring. Let them be the sanctuary where the soul can sustain itself.

How to … Stop That Inner Worrywart

February 22, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

I’m one of those incessant worrywarts. Risk mitigation is a significant facet of my work. Thus, I worry about the prospect of non-optimal results; I worry about the unintended side effects of my decisions, and I worry about what people aren’t telling me. I even worry that I worry too much (now, that worry is entirely unfounded.)

If, like many people, you’d like to worry less, perhaps you may find the following approaches helpful. Most of my over-worrying comes from thinking ahead, but after a reasonable effort to understand risks and make plans to adapt more flexibly to developing situations, I’ll just let up. I’ll self-talk as though I’m addressing a team, “Not everything is within our control. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s deal with it as it appears and course-correct.” Beyond that, I’ll get really busy with something else that keeps me too occupied to fret about the previous thing that worried me.

Trying to Be Perfect is Where Your Troubles Begin

February 20, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Fear of failure is one of the insidious confidence killers. Instead of living life in a place of self-acceptance, many folks try to live up to unrealistic ideals. They’re on a continual treadmill, chasing the illusory feeling of urging on everything in their lives to be “perfect.”

When you cling to the all-or-nothing standard, all your endeavors result in perfection or failure. This mindset drives you to see yourself as a disappointment again and again.

Let go of dichotomy. You needn’t be “perfect or failure.” Don’t build yourself up to fail with the unattainable goal of always being perfect. Instead, set goals that are very achievable and within your control. Make your goal just to take action. Not to achieve a perfect outcome, not even to a positive outcome, but just to be done. Completed with a satisfactory result. Checked off.

Idea for Impact: You don’t have to give 110% or even 100% to everything you do. Be very selective about when you want to push yourself to the max—only when the stakes are big enough and when your perfectionism is thoroughly justified.

Don’t Over-Deliver

November 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.

Get Good At Things By Being Bad First

May 2, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

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.

It’s vastly easier to revise your way into a cut above than drum up brilliance out of thin air.

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.

Just Start

February 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.

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.

Don’t Be A Founder Who Won’t Let Go

January 17, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

You’ll never get a potential successor to take your job if you’re going to be peering over her shoulder constantly and talking to employees directly about what they’re doing.

When you have a case of the founder’s syndrome, you’re addicted to running the show, and you’ll have a hard time separating yourself from the company you’ve built. When there are conflicts, you’re often at the center of it and hold your vision and experience over the leadership’s heads.

In the long run, your compulsion to have a say in all the nitty-gritty of your company will undermine the future of the very company that you’ve devoted your life to. The best thing you can do for its future is to back off and give your successor real control.

Establish a timetable to disengage yourself from the operating decisions and set some firm rules about this transition. Spend increasingly more time away from the business and pursue other interests. Start to envision a world in which your next ventures or leisure activities will become the principal focus of your life.

Idea for Impact: Know when your work is over and when it’s time for you to move on to other things. Grooming exceptional talent to take over the business you’ve built and gradually letting go of control is one of the most challenging things a founder will ever do. If done well, it’s the most transformative you can do for your business.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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Perfectionism

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Your first attempts are going to be bad

Start, even if you’re bad at it

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

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

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

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

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

Small Measures, Large Results

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

Wondering what to read next?