Showing posts with label perfectionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perfectionism. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Are you pretending the world wants you to be perfect?

Seth Godin suggest we consider abandoning our perfectionism:

It's possible you work in an industry built on perfect. That you're a scrub nurse in the OR, or an air traffic controller or even in charge of compliance at a nuclear power plant.

The rest of us, though, are rewarded for breaking things. Our job, the reason we have time to read blogs at work or go to conferences or write memos is that our organization believes that just maybe, we'll find and share a new idea, or maybe (continuing a run on sentence) we'll invent something important, find a resource or connect with a key customer in a way that matters.

So, if that's your job, why are you so focused on perfect?

Perfect is the ideal defense mechanism, the work of Pressfield's Resistance, the lizard brain giving you an out. Perfect lets you stall, ask more questions, do more reviews, dumb it down, safe it up and generally avoid doing anything that might fail (or anything important).

You're not in the perfect business. Stop pretending that's what the world wants from you.

Truly perfect is becoming friendly with your imperfections on the way to doing something remarkable.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Doing the hard thing

Do you have some big things that are hard, and you keep putting them off? Ann Voskamp believes that
hard things just keep calling you because you’re meant to answer to higher and better things.

Life is Pain — and you get to choose: either the Pain of Discipline or the Pain of Disappointment.

Nothing happens without discipline. No music gets played without discipline. No games get won. No finish lines get crossed. No freedom gets tasted.

Brilliant doesn’t matter, if you can’t get out of bed.
Talent doesn’t mean a thing, if you let fear be some terrorist that take you hostage.
Potential doesn’t add up to anything, if you get addicted to perfectionism because perfectionism is slow death by self.

Listen: Fire your perfectionism and your procrastination will quit too.
Go here to read Ann's solution