Perfectionism isn’t the pursuit of greatness, it’s fatalism. “I can’t do x, therefore I won’t do what I can do.”

“I am so busy I could not read a book this month so I will not read a page today even though I have the time. One is too little.”

When you read one page you often find you can do two. And so on. And maybe you can’t read that book in a month, but you can probably read it much sooner than you otherwise would. If you take the opportunities you have to do what you can.

But let’s say you never read more than one page a day, and you failed to do even that a third of the time. You’ll still finish most books within a year. And that’s probably faster than if you didn’t do what you can do.

You can apply this to any area of life. Make ridiculously small progress and celebrate it. Do it over and over and over again and it’ll grow. Even if you “don’t have time”.

Josh

P.S. Perfectionism can also involve obsessively working on something long passed when you should have quit. But this is the manifestation of perfectionism that I was thinking of when I wrote this.