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Curious

A community of people who are curious to find out what others have already figured out // Curious is a new personal growth publication by The Startup (https://medium.com/swlh).

How To Permanently Discard Your Perfectionist Tendencies

The ‘do something’ principle that’s changing my life

4 min readAug 25, 2023

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Photo by Pereanu Sebastian on Unsplash

My partner and I were excitedly planning our vacation.

This would be our last trip before I head to grad school on another continent.

The stakes were high because we were racing against the clock. I was only home for another 3 weeks.

A handicap

I was hell-bent on booking the cheapest flights and finding the best Airbnbs.

It wasn’t a question of money, but a quest of trying to plan the perfect trip.

The result? We didn’t book flights till the last minute and they ended up costing double the usual fare.

Trying to make something perfect never ends well. It almost always ends up as a handicap that stops you from taking action.

What’s worse is that aiming for the best outcome often ends with not even getting a good outcome.

You wait too long, or you try too hard, or you don’t take any action at all.

Perfectionism rarely begets perfection, or satisfaction — only disappointment — Ryan Holiday

An excuse

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A community of people who are curious to find out what others have already figured out // Curious is a new personal growth publication by The Startup (https://medium.com/swlh).

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