Are you a recovering perfectionist? Does everything have to be "just right," before you take action? If I've just described you, you're not alone, many of us do too.
Most parents seem to spend their children's childhoods telling them what not to do and what they're doing wrong rather than what they're doing right, and what to do.
This has long term consequences: many of us wrongly collapse their concern with a belief that we can't do anything right.
Fast forward to adulthood and many of us are hesitant about finalizing anything and endlessly procrastinate.
Procrastination is a problem for many, but it's easy to understand why we do it if you understand the underlying reason behind it.
Simply put, procrastination is when we associate more pain with doing something than with not doing it.
It's that simple.
The controlling force in people's lives is what they link pain with and what they link pleasure to.
If you associate finalizing or doing something with past negative experiences, it makes eminent sense that you're going to put off doing something for as long as you can.
Or maybe not just do it.
I grew up in a household with a very, very intellectually gifted Dad.
He excelled at so many things that it became an unspoken rule (at least in our minds) that we had to hit it out of the ballpark first time at bat, or don't even bother going up to the plate.
What a lot of unnecessary pressure on our young shoulders and an unrealistic attitude regarding doing something new.
Successful people know that learning anything new is like climbing Mount Everest, its done one step at a time.
Yes, some people are better climbers than others, but most people can learn what it takes to reach their personal Everest.
One of the secrets of successful people is that they don't wait for everything to be perfect before acting.
Not only that, but they "fail," faster.
Why? Because they believe that the universe rewards speed.
If after a lot of thought and preparation they don't get the results they were after, they look at what worked, what didn't and make the necessary course corrections.
And they keep trying until they succeed.
What would the world be like if Thomas Edison had given up trying to invent the light bulb after his second attempt? What beautiful holidays and worlds would we have missed out on if Wilbur and Orville Wright had given up, before taking off on the Kitty Hawk? What if John Hopps hadn't pursued creating the first pacemaker, how many people who are alive today might not be around? The truth is that there's no such thing as perfection.
What's perfection in one's mind is excellence in another's.
Another truth is that very few of us come out of the womb composing music like Mozart, hitting balls like Babe Ruth, or singing like Celine Dion.
It takes time and practice.
By just doing it, as the Nike ad says, instead of procrastinating because of your perceived association with pain, by not expecting perfection the first time at bat, and by committing to improving your technique by looking at what worked and what didn't, you too can be savvy about success and succeed.
After all, that's what you really want isn't it, or you wouldn't have read this article, with its controversial title.