Fire Perfection, Hire Progress Instead

I have idealistic and perfectionistic tendencies.

It’s something I’m working on, with my coach and outside of that conversation, consistently as it’s held me back in many ways.

I end up overthinking, overcomplicating projects or goals and then not doing them or falling well short of them.

I compare my measly efforts to the perfect and the ideal. And feel defeated and flawed because I didn’t hit that target.

And I’m done with it.

So to counter this, I’ve been thinking about the opposite — the absolute bare minimum.

If the measuring stick is TRULY progress and forward movement, then what is the minimum acceptable and consistent progress I can make with whatever I’m facing?

I’m calling it my Minimum Viable Progress.

And I’m taking the big obstacles in my way of progress and flipping them:

• From Perfection to Imperfection and Progress
• From Ideal to Realistic and Attainable
• From Complicating it to Simplifying, Reducing, Minimizing It
• From Overthinking to Just Getting Started, Just Doing It

For example, for daily exercise, my coach and I just talked about 5 minutes a day.

Now my Inner Critic aka The Jerk says, “Seriously, Cory, that’s pathetic.”

My response: “You might think so. But I know I gotta start somewhere and that’s the minimum commitment I can make.”

I know I can commit to 5 minutes of daily exercise. It’s reasonable and realistic. I just make sure I’m wearing my new running shoes and socks. And have some backup clothes in my truck.

Then I can do it almost any time, virtually anywhere. At home, the office, travel.

This is how I got started with this Click Publish challenge.

I started with the bare minimum: Just enough words to get a point across and then Click Publish, every day.

I removed Perfection, the Ideal, the Standard. I ignored them altogether. And keep ignoring them.

I fired Perfection and hired Progress in its place.

And I’m so dang giddy about it!