The Difference Between Success and Perfection
It’s another blog swap day! Today’s guest post is by Srinivas Rao, a personal development blogger at The Skool of Life. Srini obsesses over riding waves and finding life lessons through the sport of surfing. He is also the co-founder and host of BlogcastFM, a podcast for bloggers. Also, check out the post I wrote about lessons I’ve learned since graduating college over at The Skool of Life today.
While you might think that perfection is success, upon closer inspection you’ll find that success is the byproduct of one imperfect failure after another. Perfection on the other hand is a word we’ve made up, we’ve given meaning to it, other people have agreed with our meaning and as a result, our fear of not being perfect keeps us from beginning the journey to success.
Last week Nicole’s post about entrepreneurial perfectionism syndrome really resonated with me. I come from a background where you are continually taught that the end goal is perfection. If I brought home an A-, I was asked why I didn’t get an A+. Our reports cards were never put on the fridge. It was just expected that we brought home A’s. But, nobody ever asked the more important question. Did you actually learn anything?
The constant mentality of compare and compete was a driving force behind how many kids in my community were raised. The fatal flaw in this however is that there will always be someone better and someone worse. In the game of life you really shouldn’t compete with anybody other than yourself. The fact of the matter is that YOU WILL NEVER BE PERFECT. But, who cares? It doesn’t matter one bit. The fallacy of perfection actually sets you up for failure.
How Set Yourself up for Massive Success
One of the most useful things I learned in Tony Robbins Personal Power II course was the idea of making it easy for yourself to feel successful. Let’s take a look at a blog as an example. Let’s say you measure the success of your blog by the amount of traffic and you decide that some arbitrary number makes you successful. Well, anytime you don’t hit that arbitrary number you give yourself the message that you are a failure. Now, what if we said “anytime I wrote a blog post, I’m successful.” It’s a minor difference, but what happens is now you are setting yourself up to feel successful and as a result you will hit a success cycle. Make it easy for yourself to feel successful. Don’t let this be confused with having low standards. This is about conditioning your mind to feel good and one small success leads to a bigger one, which leads to a bigger one, which leads to the snowball effect.
As a result of this snowball effect, your subconscious starts to get a very different message. It’s a series of successful events instead of series of failures. Try it for 30 days and you’ll be amazed how much more you accomplish and how much better you feel doing it.
