Mastering the Mindset
Mastering the Mindset
Breaking Free from Perfectionism
Perfectionism can be the biggest obstacle standing between you and your goals. often times it disguises itself as high standards. In actuality, it's a fear in disguise.
• The "90% rule" – understanding that 90% done is done, as the last 10% requires disproportionate time and effort for minimal improvement
• Life isn't a constant trajectory of forward progress – learn to forgive yourself and celebrate wins instead of focusing on occasional setbacks
• Make adjustments to your expectations and workload when life circumstances change
• Success comes from countless tiny, boring actions done consistently rather than dramatic life events
• Apply the 1% rule – focus on being just slightly better each day
• Examine how you spend your time in 15-minute chunks to find hidden opportunities for progress
• Recognize that perfectionism is actually fear of rejection or judgment wearing a mask
• Remember that something has to exist before it can be great – put your work into the world
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I'm in mistakes goals. I bury my clocks because it take time. I gotta go. I already know if I want to grow, you reap what you sow. That be the case. Planting my seeds and water my base. Yeah, I made mistakes. Yeah, I know you grow in your garden, but watch for the snakes, the people that act like you. Crazy but trying this, they fall away. They don't think it's possible. I think it's possible. That is just hate if they hate themselves because they're on the shelf.
Speaker 1:Why you create a life that you love, a life that you love, yeah, loving the fact you improving yourself. Decided that you would not settle. Decided that you got the drive to do what the road got, bumping your foot on the pedal. You go up a level. You turn up whenever it's time for you to go put in that work. I know my worth. I know it ain't gonna be easy. Yeah, I know it hurt. One thing is for sure yeah, until they put me in this earth, before I ride in that hearse, I'm chasing my goals. I'm chasing my goals. Yeah, love and affect to improving yourself. Decided that you would not settle, decided that you got the drive to do it, to go got punk and good foot in the gutter. I'm chasing my goals.
Speaker 1:All right, and welcome back to another episode. Thank y'all so much for being here. If you are watching me on youtube, go ahead and like and subscribe to the channel. If you are listening to me on the podcast platform, go ahead and write. Leave me a review. Those things help me out a whole lot. Also, become a supporter of the show. You can choose the monthly amount. It can either be three, five, eight or $10. You can cancel at any time, but why would you ever do that?
Speaker 1:Let's go ahead and jump in. Today we're going to be talking about progress versus perfection, progress versus perfection, and we're going to be talking about progress versus perfection, progress versus perfection, and we're going to talk about three different things when it comes to perfection and I've touched on this topic before, but it's a good one to talk about again. It's a good topic to be reminded of again Because we're not perfect and sometimes we need to be reminded of things again after a while. So we're talking about three different areas of perfectionism and I'll give you a couple of steps on how to handle it, how to deal with it, because perfectionism can be a big reason or one of the main things that's holding you back from making progress from your dreams, from your goals. So let's dive in and I'll be honest with y'all.
Speaker 1:This is a concept that I'm still struggling with. Still, I don't mention this. I don't mention perfectionism, and talked about it so many times on here, and I'm still working on it. I'm getting better at it, but I'm human and some things just need more time and attention to correct, to get better at, because, look, I'm an actor and a hip-hop artist and I had this podcast, so in a sense, I have to also be a content creator, right? Do you know how easy it is to get caught up and trying to create the best content, the right content, or the perfect mix to a song, or the perfectionism I can have when it comes to rehearsal and how I think the scene or character or a place should go I'm constantly battling this thing and or to try and make the best social media posts, the best video ads, the best ads Right, I struggle with it, and a concept I had to adapt and to adapt and really hold myself accountable to is this when you're working on something, especially something that you are going to put out there for the world to see or on social media or for your friends and family to see, right that thing that's important to you and you've been working on and you want it to really be good. The concept is this 90% done is better than 100% done. Yep, 90% done is better than 100% done. 90% done is done. You have to adapt that that 90% done is done.
Speaker 1:For example, let's say I'm writing a song and I want to get it 100% perfect and I get it to a place where I feel like it's 90% perfect. That 90% is actually a great thing. It might take you a few hours to get something 90% perfect. Maybe it takes a few days, a few weeks to get it 90% perfect. But it might take you another year, a few years to get it perfect, to get it so perfect that you feel like it's 100% perfect. And that 10% that you're trying to achieve at that point, after you got it to 90, after that it's going to be so hard, so particular, so damn near tedious that it has to take longer. And when you get to that 90%, whatever it may be, that song, that project, that painting, that post, that last 10% you're trying to reach, it may not actually ever come and you'll spend so much time trying to get it perfect and all the time you spend trying to get that last 10%, it might double or triple or even longer than the amount of time you would have spent on it if you would have just finished it.
Speaker 1:Done is better than perfect. You're the kind of person that listens to a podcast like this, so I know you want greatness. You strive for that in yourself and when you notice that your stuff ain't quote unquote perfect, it holds you back from putting it out into the world. And if you ain't putting it out in the world, then people ain't being impacted. For example, like this podcast.
Speaker 1:Let's say it takes me about an hour to write an episode and let's say I plan it and then I get it done and I decide I want to make some changes to it to make it perfect. Then I keep looking at it and I keep changing it. Now a couple of days have gone by and I could be done with it, but I'm not. Then I come here to the studio with Bobby and that episode still sitting on my laptop, not done, and then you don't get it until another month because I come here once a month to record. Now all this time had gone by when I could have just spent that normal time the normal amount of time that it would have took, and give you something that is, give you something to the best of my abilities for you to consume and enjoy. Because, who knows? That message I had that day, it might have been exactly what you needed to hear. And now that moment is gone. 90% done is done.
Speaker 1:But in reality, what our perfectionism comes down to is this it's hidden fear. If I have this product that's 90% done and I want to work at it and work and work and work until I get at 100%, there's usually some kind of fear that when I put it out there, if it ain't perfect, I'm going to be judged or I won't be accepted, or that you'll look at whatever I put or whatever I put out there and think it ain't good. And this is what actually drives most of our perfectionism fear, and I'm going to dive into that just a second. But I want to touch on three areas when it comes to perfectionism. And the first thing you should learn is that life ain't this constant trajectory toward a constant trajectory of forward progress. You're going to make mistakes, whatever it is you're putting out there in the world whether it's a podcast, a painting, music, a project, a presentation for work, whatever it may be you're going to make mistakes.
Speaker 1:If you have health and weight loss goals let's say you want to lose 20 pounds If your goal is to eat healthy seven days a week, all the time you better believe you're going to mess up. You're going to have that piece of candy, that bad food, and at that point you have two options, and the best option is to forgive yourself and give yourself grace, because, let's say, out of 21 meals, on the last meal you had a slice of pizza. What a lot of folks do is they only focus on that one slice of pizza they had and they don't look at the other 21 times they showed up for themselves, right? We guilt ourselves and we shame ourselves, we beat ourselves up and sometimes, unfortunately, we allow that to demotivate us and we say, well, hell, what's the point of me even trying this? Look at me messing up. All I'm going to do is keep messing up, right, and then we quit, we fall off and we don't celebrate those other 21 meals or the four times you worked out. Last week, a lot of folks beat themselves up for that pizza. Right, for one moment of weakness we have. What we have to do is focus on the good, on the progress that we've made.
Speaker 1:Now, I'm not saying that it's OK to make it a habit of constantly allowing yourself that pizza and say, well, I forget myself. Already I'm going to have three more days where I eat pizza. No, you still have to keep your discipline, but get to the point where you understand that you don't have to win all the time every time, you just have to win most of the time. You don't have to make the right decision every single time, but you have to do it the majority of the time. You don't have to make the right decision every single time, but you have to do it the majority of the time, the majority, and no, not just 51 percent, because technically that is majority. But you know what I mean. Don't let that one moment here and there ruin the way you think about what you're doing. Celebrate the success you've been having, not that one mess up. And when you do mess up on that thing, right, what you should be doing next is making adjustments. You realize that yep, ok, could have done better, and you recalibrate and you get back to it, like for me.
Speaker 1:I make a daily plan every day and on this plan I write down the things I need to get done today to get me closer to my goals, as well as things I need to get done that are important, and lately I've been finding harder and harder to actually get all the things done. I either run out of time or I'm just too tired mentally to keep working on things, and whenever I'm in rehearsals for a show or in the run of a show, it took me a while to realize, but I realized that I needed to make an adjustment. Why? Because I'm in a position that I've never been in before. If I'm in a show, it means I have to be at the theater six days a week and, depending on the theater, five shows on the weekend. I'm also in the middle of working on my music, as well as planning music videos and releases for music videos for songs, coordinating studio time for the most difficult songs and still running my fitness business, which I haven't been doing any of the tasks I need to be doing to actually grow it. And on top of all that, I'm running this podcast and trying to make social media posts every day to keep my algorithm good.
Speaker 1:And when I tell you, I done had some long, exhausting weeks. I'd be so tired, and so I realized that I need to make some adjustments. I realized that while I'm in a show, I need to slow down on my daily plan Duh right. But I didn't realize that at first. I would kind of beat myself up about it too, like, come on, dutch, you better than this and you know what I should have been doing in that moment. I should have thought about all the months when I was checking off everything on my daily plan and I was being the most productive I've ever been and honestly, I still was even in the middle of a show, because even though I wasn't checking off all the things on my daily plan, I was still in the show and keeping all my other stuff in the air. So I celebrated that right and I had to stop beating myself up. So now my plan is to lessen my workload during the months when I have a show and once the show was over, ramp it back up. And that's fine as long as I'm moving forward. I had to learn to focus on the good, focus on the progress.
Speaker 1:But back to perfectionism. Don't use perfectionism as an excuse to not finish something, whatever it may be. You have to look at it and say, ok, this painting, am I basically done with this painting or this presentation? Would this take another three hours to make it 5% better? Okay, if that's the case, then I'm done and be done, and that's it. And when it comes to those mistakes, that one mistake that you might make, the one misstep you might've took, remember the thing about growth.
Speaker 1:It's hard to see when you're growing. It's hard to see when you're growing, when you're experiencing growth, like with kids, and when their bodies start to grow or change. If you see them every day, you don't always notice it right away, but when your friends see your kids or your family sees them, they be like damn, you're getting big, right. Or if you've been working out, they say, look at you, you losing weight, and you may not see it because you live with yourself every day. Or again, at you, you losing weight, and you may not see it because you live with yourself every day. Or again with kids. You really notice it when you look at old pictures, right, and you see how tiny those kids used to be, and you're like, oh, look, how tiny you used to be. You got used to how they are now and you ain't thinking about growth, because you only think about what's in front of you. You see it every day and that's the same thing with your growth. You don't notice it because you see yourself every single day of your life.
Speaker 1:We need to not only look through the windshield right where we're headed, where we want to go, what we're working towards, but also we have to look in the rear view mirror too, not to look at the bad and our mistakes, but to look at how far we came. Right, when you can look back four months ago, five years ago, and say, look, how far I've came, let that get you excited, make you feel that progress, give you motivation to keep going. But also, when you do celebrate yourself, be careful. The thing that the thing that cannot happen is complacency. What needs to happen is a spark inside you that wants to do more, that gets you in the headspace of OK, I did that, let's see how far I can take this thing. Let it allow you to get more driven. So that's my first point about perfectionism.
Speaker 1:The second thing I want to talk about is the achievement of your goals is actually accomplished through baby steps, very similar to the 1% law. What that basically is is, when you go to bed at night, when the day is all said and done, you want to be 1% better than what you were when you woke up in the morning. And the idea is which I completely agree with is that success ain't a couple of massive events that happen in your life. Success is a culmination of damn near countless teeny tiny, boring things done every day. That's it Really. It's rare that if you start working on something, you see these major events happen all of a sudden and it puts you over the top. No, it's those small tasks that you do day in and day out, those things that, when you break them down like they should be, are small, actionable items, that that you wake up and complete step by step, small action by small action, which should lead to that one percent every day of getting better, small steps at a time. And imagine how much better you would be if you decided to try and just be one small, teeny tiny percentage better each day by the end of the year.
Speaker 1:When you scroll on Instagram and you see somebody who started their own business and it's going way better than what yours is. It's not about that. It's about where your business was when you first started, compared to now, how much progress you've made in the past few months. And you say you know what I have grown, I have been putting in the work. My business is getting better.
Speaker 1:How can I celebrate that Same thing with weight loss? Let's say, if you're trying to lose weight and you're not going to lose it in a week, right, it's going to take time. Let's say you want to lose 60 pounds. It might take six months, it might take a year, it might take a year, it might take three years to get the body you want. But it's the progress that matters. It's you getting better every day, getting yourself closer to your goal.
Speaker 1:Get used to the idea of waking up and setting your attentions on trying to get just a little bit better every day. What can you do today to get better? What can you do today to get you closer to your goal? And I've definitely been guilty of this excuse. But we have to stop using the excuse that we don't have enough time, because if you really sit down and think about it, if you take a moment to look at how all your time is spent throughout the day. We have way more time than what we think. All of us get the same amount of time every day, and the truth is that some people the highly productive people they manage their time better. It just is what it is. They walk through their day with more intention.
Speaker 1:If something is really important to you, truly important to you, you're going to find a way. You just will. And if it's not that important to you, or if it just ain't as important as you think it is, then you won't find a way. It's that simple. How important is it for you to have a better life? How important is it for you to be better, to make your significant other's life better, your kid's life better, your mama right, like they say, if it's important to you, you'll find a way. If it's not important to you, you'll find an excuse. If it's important to you, you'll find a way. If it's not important to you, you'll find an excuse. How do you need to change your schedule? How do you need to change your intentions throughout the day?
Speaker 1:We can all feel like we don't have enough time, right, but think about this, and I want you to think about this. Think about your week, think about what you did every day 15 minutes for a 15-minute span. I want you to really think about that. Think about your average day and break it down into 15-minute chunks and what you did in those 15 minutes. How many times did you scroll on social media for 15 minutes? How many times did you eat and just sit there for 15 minutes? How many times did you take a dump and sit on a toilet after you finish and just look at your phone for 15 minutes? How many times did you take an extra long shower? How many times did you go walk around Target and pass time or spend money on stuff you didn't need to? How many times did you spend 15 minutes talking on the phone, talking about nothing right, or gossiping or complaining about something?
Speaker 1:Now, I'm not saying that every single second of your day should be dedicated to putting in work, but 15 minutes here and there, 30 minutes here and there will add up and it's going to be that much more time working towards things you know you need to be working on, as opposed to things that you know know are not important. Right, even if you decided that 15 minutes is important for 15 minutes here and there, that is going to be some good momentum. You're going to build momentum, that 15 minutes is going to fly by and you still want to keep working Right. So I want you to try that. Try putting in 15 minutes, setting 15 minutes aside, a couple of chunks of 15 minutes, and try See what happens. Now, what I'm not telling you is that this is sustainable, that this is that slow down, that this is sustainable and this is going to get you all the way to the top, to success that you want. You will need more than 15 minutes at a time to work on stuff, but it will at least get the ball rolling. It at least get you moving in the right direction. So that's number two achieving your goals by taking baby steps, getting 1% better every day and understanding that your goals take small actions day in and day out, not some massive event that'll bring you success.
Speaker 1:The third thing is and I already talked about it a little bit earlier but perfectionism ain't real. Thing is and I already talked about it a little bit earlier, but perfectionism ain't real your perfectionism doesn't exist. It's fake. It's a mask that you wear to cover up some kind of fear, something you're afraid of, something you're afraid to put out in the world. Some fear of rejection, some fear that you'll be judged or looked at negatively, some fear that whatever.
Speaker 1:So imagine if there was this painter right, and they had all these paintings in the garage and they've been working on all these paintings for 10 years and one day you in a garage and you're like, damn bro, look at all these dope ass paintings. These are dope. Why aren't you putting these out there? You could sell these and they say, ah, you know it ain't all the way done yet. They're not perfect the way I want it to be, but to you you're looking like bruh the hell is you talking about? This is good. Why do you think they're not putting those paintings out? It's because they're afraid they're going to put it out there. Let's say an exhibition, and some somebody gonna show up and gonna be in the crowd and they'll be like man, this sucks. How they want to charge for this, how much they're asking for this. Right, they're afraid of what people will think about them. Not that they feel like it ain't done that, they didn't do enough. Hell, they actually put in a whole lot of work on this art.
Speaker 1:But is that fear that people won't like it? And that's the same thing we do when it comes to us being perfectionists. Fear Right, because what's what's worse? To put your heart and soul in something and then get rejected, that is that has to be one of the worst things to have people think that is bad, something that's important to you, that's real. So when you call yourself a perfectionist, it's not that you feel like it ain't done, not that you don't think it's finished and perfect. You're just afraid you'll do it, show it to the world and people will reject it. So we're living our lives, holding ourselves back, holding on to things. Right, stop listening to that perfectionism. That last 10%. The reality of it is you are the only person that's going to even notice it. That last 10%, just you. And here you are afraid to put it out there because of this small thing. Just do the thing, put the thing out there. It has to exist before it can be great. Let me say that one again it has to exist before it can be great. Make it exist. Don't wait for it to be quote unquote perfect. It's time for you to show the rest of the world who the hell you are. So that's what I got for you today.
Speaker 1:If you like this episode. Please share with somebody, somebody you think that will benefit from this, that friend or family member, with somebody that you think can truly grow from this. Thank you again. Please go ahead and become a supporter of the show. You can choose the monthly amount. It can be ahead and become a supporter of the show. You can choose the monthly amount. It can be $3, $5, $8, or $10. You can cancel at any time. Why would you ever do that? Love with love? You and I Just got dressed.
Speaker 1:I got fresh On your text. Let me check. I confess I've been a mess. Do I get stressed? It's when you chase success. It's side effects like ba-ba-ba don't always connect and I talk to myself like okay, bet, like they forgot who I am. I should flex. Don't make me beat my chest.
Speaker 1:King Kong in the flesh. I don't give finesse. You only get one life. Live your best. No regrets, don't regress and I ain't come to play. No recess, don't need rest. Only checks. Blood, tears, sweat Determine what you get. I'm determined to get success. I'm trying what you expect. It's got you. Kick on in the flesh, cause they know I'm a beast, not a pet, more like a vet. Bite my chest and please don't get to bugging me. Please don't be a pest, cause they know I'm a beast, not a pet. More like a vet. Write my checks Now. Please don't get to bugging me. Please don't be a pest. I'm too focused. I've been hungering Like I'm from Budapest. Corona came and it was so ugly For the whole country. I searched for myself and I made a discovery. I've been living on Skull Island this whole time. I'm blessed. Uh, you can call me the flesh, cause they know I'm a beast, not a pet. Don't try to pet. I'm at your neck. I'm time for you to expect. Uh, king Kong in the flesh. Don't make me have to flex, beat my chest. Okay, bet, say less. I'm time for you to Expect. I'm not in the nest. I'm too fly. I left.
Speaker 1:This ain't music. This is love to me. It's like a drug to me. If you really feel it, let me know you. Fuck with me, keep it above with me, walk to myself. I know it's a plug to me. Now people look up to me. First time I heard it it really stuck to me Like I'm under a desk.
Speaker 1:They can say whatever they want, but they gotta give me respect. People love to see you down. I don't let it get me upset. I don't care if you talk down, go ahead, get it off of your chest. Hope you hate. I just treat it like the plus one. Be my guest. Y'all gon' make me drop my n***s and really start talking my s***. Everything I touch on fire and you, acting like I ain't lit, set the bars tall as the Empire State Building. If they gotta shoot me down, well, they better bring the whole clip and I'll fall to my death. Then I can rest King Kong in the flesh, cause they know I'm a beast, not a pet. Don't try to pet. I'm not your next. I'm not what you expect. King Kong in the flesh, don't make me have to flex, beat my chest, okay, bet. Say less, I'm turnt with you. Let's bet. We are the night, we use the night. We are the night. We are the night. We are the night Love we play. So Thank you.