0% Perfect is perfectly fine!
We all have things to do but we don’t do them. I was planning on writing this for weeks and I didn’t do it.
Until I heard Seth Godin say on the Tim Ferriss podcast the other week, ‘I’ve done 7400 blog posts — and 4 of those were perfect.’ Wow!
Seth Godin has written 7400 blog posts? And I couldn’t write one? I know he’s ‘Seth Godin’ and all but I refused to believe he’s 7400x better than me. So I immediately created a new folder on my computer and labelled it ‘Tan’s Blog’. I started working on ideas. I looked at old notes and made new ones.
And then I thought, ‘Let me mull over these for the next week.’ It’s November.
Cut to two weeks later, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Wouldn’t December 1 be a great date to post my first blog?’ Why, yes it would.
Now it’s December 7 and I’m thinking, ‘Wait, how about January 1?’ Of course! New Year, New Blog! Done deal. I’ll start on the first day of the new year. What could be more perfect? Hold on, my birthday is in March. From a personal perspective, isn’t one’s birthday the real new year? Let’s do it then.
Thank goodness I noticed myself falling into the trap once again: chasing perfection.
Seth hit the mark 4 times out of 7400. Why am I trying to go 1 for 1?
And that’s when I made peace with myself. This first blog post is not going to be perfect and it’s not supposed to be. I gave myself permission to start exploring bad ideas and writing imperfect posts.
So um… I missed posting this on my birthday. You see, I decided that the blog post needed some images, a pie chart, maybe a Chinese proverb, so I found myself creating those things in Photoshop. Now it’s June.
During that time I also noticed that 4 perfect things out of 7400 is 0.0005%, therefore can statistically be rounded off to 0%.
So Seth hit 0% perfection and that means I could quit after any number of posts and even if they were all crap, I would still be equal to Seth. (If I manage 5 ‘perfect’ posts from the next 7400, I could claim I beat Seth!)
I took a moment to ponder this.
That brings us smack bang into this moment. I’m typing this straight out into the web page. No more drafts, no more notes.
I didn’t make New Year’s Day. I didn’t make my birthday in March. I didn’t make Easter. But today is Midsummer — the symbolic half way point of the year. What a perfect time to post!
In all seriousness:
“It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
Whether we’re creating art, building technology or hiring personnel — if we wait for perfect we’ll be waiting a long time. And we know this already.
It’s a cliché and therefore we forget to adhere to it. Seth Godin brought it back to my attention. And I hope I brought it back to yours.
Tan Lay is Producer of Content & Communications at Immersal based in Helsinki.
