Dare to Miss a Shot

Do you ever feel like everything you do needs to be perfect, all the time?

I do. I have written many posts that I never published, because none of them ever felt ready. This is the first one I am publishing.

It comes at a time of other beginnings. I always wanted to stay in my town and run my own business, and for a while I did. But when it began to feel saturated, I realised that moving somewhere new, for exposure and learning, mattered more. So this year I left Mangalore for Bangalore, to join the team building IconicBot, an AI chatbot. Neither move would have happened if I had waited for the perfect moment.

The trouble with perfect

It is natural to aim for excellence in everything we do. But it isn’t always practical. Some things don’t need to be perfect, and some will never be perfect, however hard we try. When we chase perfection, it becomes hard to finish anything, and success rarely satisfies, because we always think we could have done better.

The real problem begins when we are so fixed on perfection that we won’t even start, because we can’t see how to do it perfectly. So we put the task off, or avoid it altogether. And when we stop, the task doesn’t go away. It just stays unfinished.

Not everything we do has to be perfect. The problem isn’t with what we do or how we do it. It is in the way we think about doing it. The flaw is in the yardstick we choose to measure it.

A spectrum, not a switch

Perfection isn’t black and white. It is a spectrum, and every small improvement along it counts. It is subjective too: what seems perfect to one person may not satisfy another. So instead of measuring yourself against someone else’s idea of perfect, measure your own learning and growth.

If you have been holding back because you think something has to be perfect first, let that go. You don’t need to wait until you are “ready”.

• Start the project you have been planning for days, months or even years.
• Start with small, realistic goals, and when you reach one, let it build your confidence.
• Start it today.

Every step towards getting better is a step forward. Don’t be afraid to miss a shot. This post is my first.