“Practice makes perfect.” Three simple words you probably heard hundreds of times growing up. It sounds like an admirable goal, but the pressure to be perfect is at the root of a lot of stress and anxiety. This week on Simple Living Sunday, I challenge you to say no to perfectionism and make “good is better than perfect” your new mantra.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Voltaire

Three simple pleasures and highlights

Continuing my practice of celebrating the simple things in life, here are three simple pleasures and highlights of the last week.

The winter of 2022 continues to serve up extreme cold temperatures and lots of snow. With that in mind, a couple of my simple pleasures this week are winter-themed.

• On Sunday afternoon, I had some quiet time. With my 2022 reading goal in mind, I started a new book.
• We had a couple of bright sunny days in between this week’s snowfalls. On Tuesday morning, the snow looked so pretty hanging in the trees.
• As we end the week with another extreme cold warning, I’m grateful to be home in my nice warm house.

I’m pretty much ready for spring now.

This week’s simple living focus: Good is better than perfect

Let me tell you a little secret: I am a recovering perfectionist.

When I was younger, I agonized over every detail. That desire to go the extra mile and make things “just so” created so much stress in my life. And if I made a mistake, I would continually beat myself up over it. It was the same for other people’s mistakes. I had little tolerance for anything that wasn’t perfect.

Perfectionism doesn’t make you feel perfect, it makes you feel inadequate.

Maria Shriver

So what changed? It started with a conversation with a co-worker. I was working late one night trying to meet a deadline. She dropped into my office as I was sitting in tears because I wasn’t happy with the work that I was doing. I remember her saying to me, “Michelle, you’re putting this stress on yourself because you’re not meeting your own standard for perfection. You could submit this right now, and no-one will notice that it’s not as perfect as you wanted it to be. Sometimes you have to accept that you did the best you could in the time you had available.”

That conversation has stayed with me for over 25 years. I still have my moments but since that day, I’ve always tried to adopt the philosophy that done is better than perfect.

High standards and wanting to produce good work aren’t necessarily bad things. But the relentless drive for perfection can actually make you perform more poorly because you get stuck tweaking and redoing to fix that last five per cent, when that time could be better spent moving on to something new.

Perfectionists are never satisfied no matter how great things are. Years after that conversation with my co-worker, I watched my daughter struggle with perfectionism with her school work. It created so much anxiety for her. 

I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for. Perfection is God’s business.

Michael J. Fox

There’s a lot of good—and even excellent—work out there that isn’t perfect. The best athletes in the world go back and watch videos of their performances to find their mistakes so they can learn from them. These are people at the top of their game, yet they know they’re not perfect. So it’s okay if you’re not either.

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Three things to do this week

The goal for this week is to reduce our stress by letting go of unrealistic expectations of perfection. Here are three ways to make that happen.

Practise forgiving yourself…and others

So, you made a mistake! Or someone else did. It’s not the end of the world.

Stop beating yourself up and keep mistakes in perspective. If it’s something as simple as a typo on a slide or blog post, let it go. Chances are no-one even noticed. If it’s a bigger thing, ask yourself what you can learn from the mistake. Then, take the learnings and move on. Dwelling on it won’t undo the error.

Give yourself permission to be human.

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake. You can’t learn anything from being perfect.

Adam Osbourne

Stop comparing yourself to others

This is especially important for young people in school, but it applies in the workplace and other areas of life as well. The pressure to be perfect often comes out of what we see from others.

I’ve often told my daughters that there will always be someone smarter, better-looking and more successful and that’s okay. Just remember that the external image people project doesn’t always reflect reality. And you don’t know how much time and effort they put into projecting that perfect image to the outside world.

Just be you and let the rest of the world do its thing.

Decide that done and good are better than perfect

Write these two sentences down on a sticky note and post them on your desk, or somewhere else that you’ll see them often.

• Done is better than perfect.
• Good is better than perfect.

When you’re tempted to spend even five minutes tweaking minor details, doing one last read through, or polishing something up that’s already pretty shiny, stop! If what you have is already good enough, move on.

Because good is better than perfect…any day of the week.

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Do you struggle with perfectionism? Tell me your tips to overcome it below.