Why it’s best NOT to strive for perfection
I don’t know about you, but I spent much of my youth trying to avoid mistakes. If my fairy godmother had ever paid me a visit back then, I would have asked her to make me perfect. What perfect meant to me as a child, I’m not even sure. I guess it meant getting all the answers right on homework, quizzes, and tests, and never being clumsy enough to fall off my bike or make a mistake in a softball game or commit an elementary or junior high fashion faux pas.
I was one of those kids who didn’t want to draw any negative attention to myself. I never wanted to be in trouble. If a teacher so much as threatened to send me to the principal’s office—what!—I probably would have grabbed Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak and quietly slunk my way out of town. Making mistakes was embarrassing and just plain BAD in my mind.
Desperately wanting to avoid mistakes became ingrained in my psyche at a very early age.
I realize now that it’s a shame this is true. Because by the time I was a teenager, I was afraid to try new things. Afraid to challenge myself. Afraid to put myself out there. God forbid I tried something difficult and failed! How humiliating.
Thankfully we humans continue to evolve.
Things have changed in the current world, where authenticity is valued and imperfections make a person more personable, more likeable. In addition, today the general thinking is that if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not pushing yourself to improve.
SET A MISTAKE BUDGET
The other day, I came across an online article by Adam Grant about life changes that highly successful people practice every day. Grant is an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
In his article, he claims that one thing highly successful people do is to “set a mistake budget.”
Yes, that’s correct: a mistake budget.
“To encourage trial and error,” he says, “set a goal for the minimum number of mistakes you want to make per day or per week. When you expect to stumble, you ruminate about it less—and improve more.”
Basically what I understand this to mean is that when you push yourself or challenge yourself to improve or learn something new, you are naturally going to make mistakes, and that you should welcome them. If you expect to make mistakes, they won’t act as a deterrent to trying new things and striving for growth.
How refreshing!
This means …
+ Mistakes are not something to fear or avoid. It’s okay if what you're doing doesn’t work out. You can try, try again.
+ Not being afraid to make a mistake frees you up to learn new things. Try that marketing strategy and see how it goes, then learn from the results (good or bad). Or write that story structure that’s unlike any you’ve ever used before—you may find that it works really well. If it doesn't, you now know it's not something you want to do.
+ Expecting mistakes will lessen the damage the shame of mistakes can do when they occur. When you expect it to happen because it's part of the process, it’s not a major setback when it actually does.
+ Incorporating mistakes into your process and learning from your mistakes in an effort to grow will eventually lead you to your goal. Step by step, you will stretch and learn your way to the finish line, one mistake (and correction) at a time.
[Please note: This does not mean it's okay to publish your book manuscript with mistakes. You still have to do your best to edit and proofread your way to a clean copy. But if you miss one or two typos after giving it your all, it is not the end of the world. Go back, make the corrections, and upload again!]
At some point in my life, as I journeyed from child to adult, I came to feel that perfection was overrated, and I’m glad that I did. But I don’t think I ever learned to truly embrace my mistakes or to think of them as stepping stones with the power to lead me forward. Perhaps 2024 will be the year in which I do.
How about you? Does this sound like a refreshing mindset that might help you along on your self-publishing journey?
