From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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You feel like it has to be perfect. So, you don’t finish. Sometimes you don’t even start. You’re not going to write down a goal if you don’t think you have the time to do it perfectly right now. So, instead of just losing five pounds in the next two months, you decide you’ll diet later and so you gain.

Perfect can paralyze you. It can keep you from making progress. It can keep you from starting. And if you don’t start, you can’t finish.

Aiming for excellence is great. Let’s do our best. But let’s don’t live lives devoid of any accomplishment because perfection was our goal instead of setting a goal and making forward progress.

The cemetery is full of people who had perfect plans. Perfect books that were never written. Perfect movies that were never shot. Perfect lesson plans that were never taught. And all those perfect thoughts died with the person without being done.

It seems to me an admirable goal done pretty well is better than a perfect goal that died and never saw the light of day.

Take this post for example. I’ve been struggling to write blog posts lately because I thought I had to write 750 words every time I write. I don’t.

The last 50 days, I have lots of perfect posts I wrote in my head and never made it out here. I think aiming for a couple of hundred words of well-thought-out ponderings is better than 1,000 words of perfection that were never published.

Are you letting a false dream of perfection become your perfect straight jacket? Can you back off on your personal expectations and actually get something done that is important to you?

Makes perfect sense to me.

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