Are You Waiting To Be Perfect?

“The need for perfection is born out of the fear of making mistakes”

One of the biggest things that holds people back is the mindset that they have to reach a certain level of perfection before they do anything. Hey, I do the same thing from time to time.

Are you a perfectionist?

You might find that you are more of one that you would like to admit. Here are some indications that you are trying to be a perfectionist:

1 Do you think that if you learn just one more thing then you will have the skills to leave your house, approach women, get a job, be able to finally X??

2 Do you have a collection of tapes, DVDs, books, and certificates piled up somewhere that you can never get rid of?

3 Do you endlessly over-examine  social situations and then find yourself standing alone after everyone else has walked away?

4 Do you believe that it is better to do nothing than to make a mistake?

I have been working on this site for about a month. I was informed that the site where I was before was going out of business. So I went on a quest to find software that would do what I wanted it to do. What I found was a combination of things that would do even a better job that what I had found before.

I went though hundreds of websites because I wanted not just a good solution but a much better solution than I had before. When I first found the old company they were on the cutting edge of what was out there. They had a good software package that did what few were able to. The problem is that they would put it on the cheapest servers they could find. So it tended to crash a lot. Of course this meant that when the site was offline we were out of business.

I still have that software running on the old server. Yes just yesterday it crashed again for 5 hours. I had to make a choice. I could keep this site on the old server and with the old software or I could just make the change before the site was…perfect. As screwed up as the old member software was, at least I knew it well. It was familiar. It was also crap.

I was doing what so many other people do. I was attached to my familiar crap and making excuses for not making a move. I had a ton of them.  Everything from not having the members area up yet to waiting to find the perfect template. The other site was 150 pages and had 10 gigs of video and other stuff.

I had to admit that is was time to move on and that I had to do so with an imperfect site. It was never going to be perfect. The truth is that much of the stuff on the old site was stuff that no longer applied to where we are now with the skills we teach. It was time to let go and start over. So I changed the site over. Then of course I changed the links and the site main address. Then the members software stopped working 🙂  Then some uploads screwed up. Then …then…then…

The trick to getting anywhere is not to wait until things are perfect. That will paralyze you. The need for perfection is born out of the fear of making mistakes. Read that again because it is important. Perfectionists are afraid that they can’t adapt to things that are not working correctly. So they overcompensate by making things so perfect that nothing can go wrong.

This is a SLOW process because you will always find something else that needs improved.

What is the answer?

The answer is simple. Be comfortable with the idea that something can go wrong. To do that you have to become comfortable with making mistakes. To do that you have to be able to deal with 2 truths.

1 It is ok to fail. Huh? This is kryptonite to the perfectionist. The begin to shiver and shake. They become weak and start to get light headed. This concept blows their minds. I could rationaliize this for them and tell them100 stories about how the biggest successes stories you ever hear about have all had huge failures in life. That won’t make any difference. The reason is that there is such emotion fueling the perfection that no matter what I say about other people, it just won’t get through.

2 Learn to adapt. The reason that most perfectionists try so hard is because they don’t believe they can adapt when problems do arise. They get stuck and are trapped by the one direction they have chosen. If you learn to adapt you can handle any problem. So getting it right the first time is not really important anymore.

This is where balance come in. When you brain is functioning in a balanced way you can create and adapt while moving instead of being stuck creating with no movement. This is a physical brain function. Too much emotion eats up resources that should be used to create and adapt. Too much emotion can also cause a mental retreat into creating with no adapting. So we get stuck thinking about what we will do instead of doing anything.

In developing the 3D Mind we have used this concept to build a process that balances the way the brain functions. We have creativity with emotion. We have adaptability with movement. So mistakes become nothing ore than a waypoint of where to go next rather than a dead end.When that happens there is no need to be a perfectionist. You get something up and running and see what needs to be done next.

That is the way I look at this site. I am not sure what I need to do next. That will depend on your feedback. Feel free to let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Tom Vizzini