Progress Over Perfection: 3 Tips to Stay Focused

2 years ago

“In business perfection is the enemy of profitability.” says Mark Cuban.

Some entrepreneurs can often become obsessed with perfection. It’s great to want your business to be the best that it can be. However, you also need to realise that progress is more important than perfection. In fact, perfectionism might be hindering your business.

If you look at some of the successful entrepreneurs or business owners you’ll see that they took their work one step at a time to get where they are today. You will need to do the same thing.

It takes years to build a successful business, you can not expect it to appear overnight!

Why You Don’t Want To Be Perfect

Being a perfectionist can greatly slow down your workflow. It can cause you to waste your time and lower your productivity.

If you know you are going to need to spend a lot of time making something perfect, it can be much harder to get working on it and create procrastination!

Perfectionism leads to discontentment

Perfectionists are always discontent with their work. This causes them a lot of stress and worry. Soon, it will start feeling like nothing that you do is good enough which is not a good mindset to have. If you are feeling this way, you will never feel satisfied with your work.

To stay happy and healthy, you will want a more positive mindset. Instead of focusing on perfection, put your focus into making progress. Learn to do “good enough” while trying to do better each day. You want to improve each time you make something for your business.

Plus, it is much easier to measure your progress than it is to tell if something is perfect. Now at the same time of course, that does not mean you should not put all your effort into the work that you do.

Furthermore, if you do not feel your work is quality, your audience will notice right away. It is better to have confidence in everything that you make and do for your business.

Perfection is not possible

Perfection is impossible to achieve. Even the most well-known entrepreneurs are not perfect. Perfectionism includes impossibly high standards that can never be reached. When you hit a certain goal with your work, then continue redoing it to try to “perfect” it, you likely will feel like you are not reaching the standard you set for yourself.

This can have a negative impact on mental health. It can leave you feeling unsatisfied and unsure of the quality of your work. Over time, this could even make you feel worthless.

Instead, you will want to focus on the positives. Consider each new job or sale a learning experience. Once you have completed the project, you know that the next one you do will be even better.

How to Focus on Progress

It can be difficult for you to see your progress at first. Follow these tips to stay focused on progress not perfection:

1 Look at the big picture

Are you accomplishing your goals? Is your audience growing? Are you making more sales? If you are, then you are making progress with your business. You want to hold yourself accountable for the work that you do, this does not mean being a perfectionist. Instead, you’ll want to do the best work you can, in the time frame that you have. While some revisions are likely to be needed, you don’t want to rework everything constantly. This will leave you feeling drained and you might start resenting your business.

2 Celebrate all of your wins

Whether they are big wins or small, celebrate them all, because a win is a win! This will make all of your goals feel important and allow you time to feel good about the hard work you’re doing. You deserve to celebrate! This really does help with motivation and keeping you in a positive mindset.

3 Track Your Progress

You’ll want to set aside a small block of time each day that you work, so that you can log your progress. If you’re using a project management tools and apps, you can view your daily/weekly progress in there. Make sure to record all of your accomplishments, whether they are big or small. A suggestion you can use a success folder that you have on your phone or laptop, put screenshots, files, anything and use this for motivation. At the end of each week, you can review what you accomplished. From there, you can determine what your goals for the next week should be.

In life everything is about balance, so while working hard to start, run and grow your business, producing quality work is important, yes, but perfect work doesn’t exist so focus on the amazing progress you’re making and the lives your business is changing.