Why You Should Make Progress Your Priority
Progress is a better guiding principle than perfection or growth
Where did the first half of the year go?
If you’re anything like me, you started the year with big ideas and ambitious goals. But, 7 months after, you haven’t seen as much progress as you’d like. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work, and to delay those long-term projects until "later”.
Last week I had time to check in on my goals, and figure out how to make the most of the rest of the year. But one idea kept coming to my mind. The idea of progress as an alternative to perfection.
I’ve always been proud to be a perfectionist, but recently I realized that my perfectionism is just fear of failure. It's fear of not being good enough, of not meeting other's expectations.
According to the wise words of Julia Cameron “it's a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough - that we should try again.” Brené Brown, author of “The Gifts of Imperfection”, goes even further by stating that perfectionism “is often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis. Healthy striving is self-focused: How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused: What will they think?”
Perfectionism is not a quest for the best.
Perfectionism is black or white, progress is shades of grey. Perfectionism is an endless loop, progress is decisive action. Perfection doesn’t make room for failure, progress is built on mistakes. Perfectionism is paralyzing, progress is liberating. Perfection is tomorrow, progress is today.
But why is the idea progress so interesting to me? A number of reasons:
- Progress is a humbling act. You acknowledge it’s impossible to make anything perfect at first try and instead you focus on improving it over time. You focus on making small everyday progress, constantly experimenting and iterating.
- Progress is a movement towards a goal, it forces you to have clarity about what you want. You’d never get in your car with no idea where you’re going, but we do this all the time in life. Progress towards a goal is rarely a direct route but you always need to have a clear destination. Just like driving.
- You cannot make progress without making decisions. It forces you to be decisive and assertive.
- When you’re focused on progress you value every achievement, even the small ones. You celebrate progress, not just big wins. Research shows that acknowledging and celebrating small wins actually helps us continue to make progress. These small bits of progress reinforce our confidence in ourselves and our goals.
Even the most perfectionist of us all thought progress over perfection. The first iPhone was groundbreaking, but it still shipped without a copy-and-paste function or a handful of other features Apple would have liked to include. Steve Jobs knew that at some point you have to compromise. He thought like a radical pragmatists — ambitious, aggressive, and rooted in ideals, but also imminently practical and guided by the possible. Not thinking small, but making the distinction between the critical and the extra.
“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection." —Mark Twain
But be careful to avoid the illusion of progress.
As Ernest Hemingway said, “never confuse movement with action.” Do not mistake progress with motion. Hamster wheels keep moving but the hamster doesn’t make any progress.
Checking your mail every hour is fake progress. Simply deleting 95% of your mails is real progress. Updating your LinkedIn account is fake progress. Getting stuff done and shipping things is real progress. Fake progress is what everybody else does. And when you do what everybody else does, when you’re just keeping pace with everybody else, then that’s just not enough for the competitive world we’re now living in. Real progress is what nobody else does. Real progress gives you an advantage, simply because nobody else out there does it.
For a more progressive economy.
Progress becomes an even more interesting concept when you look at it from a business perspective . Today, mainstream economic thinking can still be boiled down to a single word: growth. In his book “Sapiens”, Yuval Noah Harari explains it better: "The modern capitalist economy must constantly increase production if it is to survive, like a shark that must swim or suffocate.” But “when growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily lead to catastrophe.”
The way I see it, progress is a much better goal than (mindless) growth. Growth means increase in size, number, value, or strength. Progress is a movement or advancement through time. Progress means that we make things better for ourselves, but also for others. It means that we progress but help the world progress as well.
