It’s another blog swap day! Today’s guest post is by Srinivas Rao, a personal development blogger at The Skool of Life. Srini obsesses over riding waves and finding life lessons through the sport of surfing. He is also the co-founder and host of BlogcastFM, a podcast for bloggers. Also, check out the post I wrote about lessons I’ve learned since graduating college over at The Skool of Life today.
While you might think that perfection is success, upon closer inspection you’ll find that success is the byproduct of one imperfect failure after another. Perfection on the other hand is a word we’ve made up, we’ve given meaning to it, other people have agreed with our meaning and as a result, our fear of not being perfect keeps us from beginning the journey to success.
Last week Nicole’s post about entrepreneurial perfectionism syndrome really resonated with me. I come from a background where you are continually taught that the end goal is perfection. If I brought home an A-, I was asked why I didn’t get an A+. Our reports cards were never put on the fridge. It was just expected that we brought home A’s. But, nobody ever asked the more important question. Did you actually learn anything?
The constant mentality of compare and compete was a driving force behind how many kids in my community were raised. The fatal flaw in this however is that there will always be someone better and someone worse. In the game of life you really shouldn’t compete with anybody other than yourself. The fact of the matter is that YOU WILL NEVER BE PERFECT. But, who cares? It doesn’t matter one bit. The fallacy of perfection actually sets you up for failure.
How Set Yourself up for Massive Success
One of the most useful things I learned in Tony Robbins Personal Power II course was the idea of making it easy for yourself to feel successful. Let’s take a look at a blog as an example. Let’s say you measure the success of your blog by the amount of traffic and you decide that some arbitrary number makes you successful. Well, anytime you don’t hit that arbitrary number you give yourself the message that you are a failure. Now, what if we said “anytime I wrote a blog post, I’m successful.” It’s a minor difference, but what happens is now you are setting yourself up to feel successful and as a result you will hit a success cycle. Make it easy for yourself to feel successful. Don’t let this be confused with having low standards. This is about conditioning your mind to feel good and one small success leads to a bigger one, which leads to a bigger one, which leads to the snowball effect.
As a result of this snowball effect, your subconscious starts to get a very different message. It’s a series of successful events instead of series of failures. Try it for 30 days and you’ll be amazed how much more you accomplish and how much better you feel doing it.
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I was also raised with that sense of competition and “how come you didn’t get an A instead of an A-.” I think it’s really affected how I view myself, my goals and my achievements. I think it drives what I want, but I’ve started losing that. I don’t see the point in competing anymore. I just want to be a better, happier me. Great post! I think it will help many people see that they don’t have to be perfect to be successful.
It’s ironic that Srini posted about this topic because I indirectly wrote about the same topic on http://www.theskooloflife.com. “All or nothing thinking” is extremley detrimental. Also, success doesn’t just look like one thing. I’m so glad you realized this before you had to go on serious doses of depression meds to overcome this!
@Nicole: Thanks for the opportunity to guest post here MsCareergirl. I’m not sure where I even came up for the ideas in this post. But, I’ve spent a good amount of my life living up to other people’s ideals, and when I finally stopped I became a much happier person. There are so many moments in my life where if I had been willing to make a fool of myself, I would have been actually better off. But, this idea of perfection actually results in fear of taking action.
ooo very good point- perfection is probably CAUSED by the fear of taking action, or the fear of failure.
I agree, looking back I spent a lot of time living up to other peoples ideals too. I’m so happy I let that notion go- it was exhausting! Now I have no problem marching to my own beat.
I was raised with the same push for perfection. I distinctly remember getting a near-perfect score on my ACT, coming home to show my parents, and them asking me when I could re-take the test… awesome.
Instead of being sucked into it, I pretty much rebelled against that whole way of thinking. For me it’s all about chasing a happy, less-stressful, family-filled lifestyle instead of working 90 hour weeks, amassing riches, but not really getting to see my kids.
Thanks for the post Srinivas!
@Mike: I’ve gone through the exact same thing. It’s great that you rebelled against it. For the longest time I was taught not to rebel because I got punished for rebelling.