The Strive for Perfection Kills Growth.

People come into business and have this idea that if they do things perfectly, they will succeed at a higher rate. Trying to write the perfect article, or build the perfect website, or create the perfect ad.

The problem is we don’t know what perfect is. Perfect is often times our own particular viewpoint, which could be significantly off-base compared to what perfect ACTUALLY is… assuming it even if it exists.

Another thing to consider is that if you are striving for perfection, you are unlikely going to experience any level of failure because of your lack of action taking. The fear of doing something incorrectly, will lead to doing NOTHING.

The reality is that messing things up are critical. You have to be willing to be imperfect to get closer to perfect.

Let's look at a good analogy.

We Shoot Lousy Shots, Before We Sink Baskets.

I have been playing basketball my entire life. I remember my younger years going down to the park and literally spending hours shooting 3 point shots, missing more than I was making. Through time, and through lots of missing shots, I got better at sinking baskets.

I never read a book on "how to shoot a basket". In other words, I didn't try to perfect what I was doing before I practiced doing that very thing. It was a requirement for me to fail, and to fail lots in order to get better.

If you think in terms of playing a particular sport like basketball, when you shoot a ball and it doesn't go in, you are naturally learning how to shoot the basketball better. You learn from your mistakes and what not to do.

But if you try to perfect your shot before you ever took a shot, you wouldn't be getting the critical practice that you needed to succeed.

If you apply those exact same principles of business, I think you were going to find that striving for perfection is not a good approach. It is a "limiting" factor to your overall success as it leads to less action taking, and bigger focus on analytics than productivity.

Again, lack of action means lack of productivity...and lack of potential for success.

Find Failure Faster. Succeed Quicker.

As a rule of thumb, if something slows down the process of us finding failure then it is going to lead to less productivity and realization of what leads to success.

So what I want you to do is focus entirely on taking action, embrace any sense of failure and use that as a learning experience to make your next action that much closer to perfect. Get out there miss some baskets so you can start hitting more and more baskets with greater frequency as a result of the practice and consistent action that you are putting forth.

Perfect doesn't exist. Close to perfect does, and that will be achieved through trial and error.

Try stuff, fail at stuff, get better and doing stuff, and find your way "towards" perfect with much more efficiency.