“Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it.”
Edith Schaeffer

One of the most common challenges that people email me about – and I myself have had quite a bit of trouble with – is perfectionism.

It’s an issue that can hold you back in life. Not only from achieving and finishing what you want.

But sometimes from even getting started. While at the same time draining your self-esteem, causing self-doubt and getting you stuck in a negative spiral where it can become harder and harder to start moving forward.

So today I’d like to share 6 things that have helped me – and still helps me to this day – with this destructive and distracting thought habit.

1. Go for good enough.

Aiming for perfection usually winds up in a project or something else never being finished.

So go for good enough instead.

Don’t use it as an excuse to slack off. But simply realize that there is something called good enough and when you are there then you are finished with whatever you are doing.

So find a balance for yourself where you do good work and don’t slack off but at the same time don’t get lost in trying to improve and polish something too much.

How to find that balance? I have found my own balance through trial and error and experience.

2. Realize that you hurt yourself and the people around you by buying into myths of perfection.

By watching too many movies, listening to too many songs and just taking in what the world is telling you it is very easy to be lulled into dreams of perfection.

It sounds so good and wonderful and you want it.

But in real life it clashes with reality and tends to:

• Cause much suffering and stress within you and in the people around you.
• Harm or possibly lead you to end relationships, jobs, projects etc. just because your expectations are out of this world.

I find it very helpful to remind myself of these simple facts.

Whenever I get lost in a perfectionist headspace I remind myself that it will cause me and my world harm.

And so it become easier to switch my focus and thoughts because I want to avoid making destructive choices and avoid causing myself and the people closest to me unnecessary pain.

3. Accept that you are human and so are everyone else.

Set human standards for everyone and accept that life is like that.

Everything and everyone has flaws and things don’t always go as planned. You can still improve things but they will never be perfect.

And realize that you won’t be rejected if things or you aren’t perfect.

At least not by reasonably well-balanced human beings, like most people actually are in reality.

4. Compare yourself to yourself.

Comparing yourself to other people on a regular basis can easily lead to feeling inferior. There will always be a lot of people ahead of you in any area of life.

So compare yourself to yourself…

• See your improvement and how far you have come.
• Look back at what you have overcome.
• Appreciate yourself and focus what you have done and are doing rather than what everyone else is doing.

5. Do what you think is the right thing.

So you realize that perfectionism will harm you and you try to avoid it. But people and media and the society around you have an influence over how you think and feel.

One of the best ways I have found to practically lessen that influence is by doing the right thing as much as possible.

When you do that other people’s expectations have less and less power over you and you take more charge of your life.

Because by doing the right thing your self-esteem and self-confidence goes up and other people’s opinions about you and life will matter less to you.

You have become stronger, more certain in who you are and you are not so easily swayed by external forces.

6. Shape an environment of human standards around you.

Emotions are contagious. So is perfectionism.

And even though you can lessen the impact that your environment has you can also work at the other end of things.

You can reshape your environment by for example:

Reducing or cutting out the sources that try to reinforce perfectionism in you.

Take a little time to review what websites, magazines, podcasts, TV-shows and books you spend a lot of time with. Take a look at if they have realistic and positive expectations or views on you and on life.

And if not, choose to spend more of your time with the sources that lift you up and support you.

Spending less time with nervously perfectionistic people.

And more of your time each week with people who are trying to improve themselves and/or are living a good life in a positive, healthy and relaxed way.

 

“You only live once, but if you do it right once is enough.”
— Mae West

Twenty years ago, I was lucky enough to witness the humble, elegant, peaceful passing of my 89-year-old grandfather. As I sat quietly in his hospice room alongside my grandma and other family members, his nurse smiled softly and said, “I can see he lived well. People his age often pass just the way they lived.”

And as I drove home that evening a couple questions kept cycling through my mind…

“Am I living well?”

“What do I want to be able to smile about on the inside when I’m close to the end?”

These questions are tough, especially the second one. At the time, I struggled to fully accept my own mortality — just thinking about it stressed me out. So I simply avoided the question and the soul-searching it demanded of me. I distracted myself for a few more years until I found myself back in a hospice room with my grandma on her 90th birthday (she was the most amazing human being I’ve ever met, by the way).

On what would become one of the last days of her life, I sat with my grandma for the entire day, in silence, in laughter, in tears, and in awe of a woman who was still smiling and sharing stories despite incredible weakness and exhaustion. Her mind was amazingly strong even just a short time before her death. So I gave her my undivided attention — I soaked up her wisdom one last time.

And I was all ears until she asked me a version of that question I had avoided a few years earlier. “Do you know why I’m happy right now?” she asked me.

“Because you’ve lived well,” I said.

She smiled even wider, and then she spent the next hour speaking softly and passionately about her life and the things she did along the way that opened doors to her present happiness. It was without a doubt one of the most enlightening and unforgettable hours of my life. Immediately afterward, she took a nap — one of her final naps — and I wrote a journal entry about everything told me.

Although I’ve shared many of her insights and quotes with readers and clients in the past, today is the anniversary of my grandma’s passing, so I’d like to honor her once more. To do so, I’m going to share an expanded version of the notes from that specific journal entry I wrote in her hospice room just over a decade ago. It’s her wisdom with my twist. I’ve done my best to convey what she told me in five inspiring points — the habits and ways of living that allowed my 90-year-old grandma to sustain genuine happiness all her life:

1. My grandma kept her negative self-judgment in check, and gave every day her best.

One of my grandma’s favorite quotes was by Walt Disney: “Around here, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious — and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

It inspired my grandma for decades, and it still inspires me every day to write and create — to move on to my next piece of work, even when I catch myself judging my last piece of work as “not good enough.”

For example, it’s been almost 19 years now that Angel and I have been publishing new articles every week on Marc & Angel Hack Life. Sometimes the ideas and words come easier than others, and there have been plenty of times when I’ve felt like my writing and work was sub-par.

“I thought this was a great article. Why aren’t people reading and sharing it?” Or I’ll feel like I fumbled through an article only to watch it receive thousands of shares on social media. Regardless of which outcome I’m dealing with, my grandma’s wisdom always reminds me of one key point: As human beings, we are often terrible judges of our own work. We are just too self-critical to see the truth most of the time.

And not only that, it’s not our job to judge our own work. It’s not our job to compare it to everyone else’s work, or to how we thought others would perceive it. There’s no use in doing that.

Instead, it’s our job to create. Our job is to share what we have right now in this moment. Our job is to come as we are and give it our best shot, every single day. That’s how my grandma lived her life. She was a true artist in that way.

Realize that there are people in nearly every career field who make each day a work of art simply by the way they have mastered their craft. Yes, almost everyone is an artist in some way. And every artist will have the tendency to judge their own work. The important thing is to not let your self-judgment talk you out of doing your thing and sharing your creative and unique gifts with the world.

Just like Walt said, the key is to “keep moving forward.”

2. My grandma consistently did hard things.

Sadly, most people give up on their life stories far too early. They come out of school or college wanting to change the world, wanting to build an enterprise, wanting to make lots of money, wanting to start a family and live happily ever after. But they get into the middle of it all and discover it’s way harder than they anticipated. They encounter many setbacks, and they can’t see anything over the distant horizon anymore. So they wonder if their efforts are moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the ones ahead are getting larger, at least not fast enough. So they take it out on their family and friends, or themselves, and they go aimlessly looking for an easier path that doesn’t fulfill them.

Don’t be one of these people.

My grandma had a Winston Churchill quote hanging in her home office that said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

And she strongly believed that good things don’t come easy. “True strength consists of what you do on the third, fourth and fifth tries,” she told me. Take this to heart!

Never give up on your journey. Never stop trying. Never sell out or sell yourself short. Life is tough, but you are tougher. Your journey isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be worth it. To never struggle is to never grow. It doesn’t matter what’s happened or what you’ve done; what matters is what you choose to do from here. Accept the circumstances, learn from them, and take another step forward.

3. My grandma focused on the present, and appreciated the little things.

“Remember, you don’t know what the future will bring. So your best bet for living is to make the best and most positive use of the present,” my grandma said.

The universe is always talking to us — sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipitous events, reminding us to stop, to look around, and to believe in something special, something more.

But this special something isn’t somewhere else. It’s right where you are.

Sometimes you have to stop searching, and just BE. You aren’t missing anything anywhere else. You’re only missing the goodness in front of you.

Let me assure you, you could run around trying to do everything, and travel around the world, and always stay connected, and work and party all night long without sleep, but you could never do it all. You will always be missing something, and thus it will always seem like something amazing might be happening elsewhere. Focusing on this is obviously futile.

Hustle, work hard, and seek adventure, but do it with your eyes wide open and focused on your present step.

You have everything right now. The best in life isn’t somewhere else — it’s right where you are at this moment. Notice it, and make it memorable.

4. My grandma honed the peace of mind that comes with letting things go.

This point is a perfect successor to the previous one. Letting go isn’t about having the ability to forget the past, it’s about having the wisdom to embrace the present.

Truth be told, the more you talk about it, debate it, rethink it, rehash it, cross-analyze it, get paranoid about it, track it, respond to it, contend with it, complain about it, immortalize it, cry over it, kick it, insult it, gossip about it, pray over it, put it down or dissect its motives… it continues to fester and rot in your mind.

It’s time to accept that it’s over! It’s dead! It’s gone. It’s done. It’s time to bury it because it’s stinking up your life, and no one wants to be near your rotted corpse of bad memories, or your decaying attitude. Be the funeral director of your past life and bury that thing once and for all!

“Every difficult life situation can be an excuse for hopelessness or an opportunity for growth, depending on what you choose to do with it right now,” my grandma told me. “We have to let go of the ideas, outcomes, and expectations that aren’t serving us.”

Take pause when you must. Realize that holding on is being brave, but letting go and moving forward is often what makes us stronger and happier in the end. (Note: Angel and I discuss this practice in more detail in the Happiness and Adversity chapters of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

5. My grandma read a lot and was incredibly generous with her knowledge.

My grandma’s personal heroes were educated visionaries and dreamers — those beautiful people among us who invest in themselves and then use what they’ve learned to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in tiny ways or enormous ones. Some succeed, some fail, most have mixed results, but it’s the effort itself that’s heroic, as she saw it. Win or lose, my grandma admired those who intelligently fight for the greater good. And I couldn’t agree more with her sentiment.

Don’t stop learning. Don’t stop investing in yourself. Study. Read. Devour books. Engage with people, including those who think differently. Ask questions. Listen closely. And don’t just grow in knowledge. Be a person who gives back. Use what you’re learning to make a difference.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The purpose of life is not to simply be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Closing Thoughts: A Benediction

I want to leave you with a paraphrased version of a poem by Bessie Anderson Stanley that my grandma used to have hanging on the side of her refrigerator when I was growing up. I think it perfectly embodies the overall message of this essay, and the overall reason my grandma was genuinely happy for the majority of her life:

“She has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;

Who has enjoyed the trust of good women, the respect of good men, and the love of children;

Who has filled her niche and accomplished her task;

Who has never lacked appreciation of life’s beauty or failed to express it;

Who has left the world better than she found it,

Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;

Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best she had;

Whose life was an inspiration;

Whose memory a benediction.”

Now it’s your turn…

Angel and I would love to hear from YOU. Your feedback is important to us.

Please leave us a comment below and let us know:

Which point mentioned above resonates with you the most today?

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

It’s not what you say to everyone else that determines your life; it’s what you whisper to yourself that has the greatest power and influence.

The best lessons we learn in life are the lessons we learn over and over again. The human mind needs lots of reminders — lots of practice — to operate effectively. For example, deep down we know it’s OK to…

• Say “no”
• Speak up
• Tell the truth
• Believe differently
• Change our mind
• Prioritize our needs
• Learn from our mistakes
• Embrace our imperfections
• Forgive and seek forgiveness
• Begin again, stronger than before

Yet, we often do the exact opposite when life gets stressful and we’re under pressure.

We do the wrong things even when we know better.

Because the human mind has weaknesses. It becomes forgetful and insensible when it’s stressed. And the only way to conquer these weaknesses is to practice conquering them. Yes, the mind is like a muscle, and just like every muscle in the human body it needs to be exercised to gain and maintain strength. It needs to be trained daily to grow and develop gradually over time.

The easiest strategy to practice strengthening the mind?

Empowering Quotes on Sticky Notes

It’s all about keeping the right thoughts front and center every day, so they’re readily available in those moments when you need them most. For Marc and me, that means pausing as often as necessary and reflecting on precisely what we need to remember. To make this practice seamless we write ourselves important reminders on sticky notes, like the ones digitally represented below, and then we put them up where we can quickly see and read them throughout the day (most of my sticky notes are up on the wall in my home office, and then I have a couple on my bathroom mirror and refrigerator too).

Our sticky notes keep us on track by keeping our minds empowered with the right perspective. Through this daily practice Marc and I have ultimately learned that while you can’t always control the outer world, you can always choose to fill your inner world with strength, faith, peace, and love. And I’m sure you’ve learned something similar over the years from your own life experiences. But just like us, you often forget. Which is precisely why we have our sticky notes up where we can see them.

So my challenge to YOU is to start practicing alongside us. To get started, use the notes below — perhaps just the ones that resonate most — and rewrite them on physical sticky notes, so you can then stick them up where you can see and read them first thing every morning. Whenever you catch yourself feeling overwhelmed or off-center throughout the day, pause for a moment and quietly read them again to yourself. See how doing so gradually changes the way you respond to life in the heat of the moment…

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(Note: Most of the notes above are included in “The Good Morning Journal: Powerful Prompts & Reflections to Start Every Day”.)

You can use different forms of visual notes too.

Written sticky notes like the ones we’re encouraging you to create are powerful, but they merely scratch the surface of possibilities for beneficial visual reminders. For instance, my phone, tablet, and laptop all have their backgrounds set to photos of my family, both because I love looking at them and because, when work gets really tough, these photos remind me of the people I am ultimately working for. It’s simple but it helps.

I also know dozens of other people who successfully use similar visual reminders on a daily basis. A coaching client of ours who has paid off over $100K of debt in the past five years has a copy of her credit card balance taped to her work computer’s monitor; it serves as a daily reminder of both the progress she is grateful to have made, and debt she still wants to pay off. Another one keeps a photo of herself when she was 90 pounds heavier on her refrigerator as a reminder of the unhealthy lifestyle she never wants to go back to, and the gratitude she has for the changes she has made in her life.

Think of moments when you are most likely to give in to impulses that keep you stuck or take you farther away from your best intentions. Then use written sticky notes and empowering visual reminders to interrupt those negative impulses, so you can keep yourself on track in a positive state of mind in the days ahead.

Now it’s your turn…

Yes, it’s your turn to get some empowering notes up on the walls in your living and working spaces, so you can easily reference them. But before you go, please leave Marc and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this post. Your feedback is important to us.

Which sticky note or idea above resonates with you the most today?

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.