Latest / Wanzology / Progress Not Pefection
Transcript
- Progress Not Perfection Hey, oh, hey, oh, hey!! What's going on? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!! I'm your host, The Wanz, coming at you live and direct!! Yes, yes, yes. How you been? How are you now? What do you think you're gonna be like later? Pressing questions that you don't have to answer right now. This week, I got caught in my own trap. I have a bad habit. I have a very bad habit of procrastinating. I know I'm not the only one who does these kind of things, I still don't understand where it comes from. Every one of us can do a lot of things, a lot of things, more than we probably give ourselves credit for. And every once in a while, some more times than others, like me, more times than not, I will figure out a way to discourage myself from even attempting something. I don't understand what that is. What am I afraid of? What are you afraid of? I bet it's failing. Maybe it's succeeding. But if you don't do something, then those consequences that you're afraid of stand less of a chance of happening. But the catch is, if those consequences don't come, number one, you don't achieve. Number two, you remove the opportunity to learn. Like I've said before, either I win or I learn. I never lose. My big procrastination centers around busking. You know what busking is? That's where, you know, you see street musicians that are hanging out and they have a guitar case or some kind of box open and they're just playing, and people who like what they hear will throw money in there. I have all the equipment to do that. I have the ability to do that, except for that courage part, because it's something that I haven't really done before. I'm curious. I will sing anywhere for anyone at any time. I'm not shy about being able to sing. But if I were gonna busk, if I was gonna be a street musician, that means I have to play. I don't believe that my meager guitar skills will support me. “Well, wait a minute, you used to have a gig once or twice a month playing out at the airport. You played in front of people you didn't know, and you got things done, and you made a little money.” “Yeah. So?” “Well, why don't you just do that?” “I don't know. I don't know.” If you're anything like me, you probably carry that one little piece of person that wants everything to be perfect. You want it to be just so. If it's just the right temperature, if the sun is just at the right angle in the sky, if it's the right time of day, if, if, if. And when all those things come together, still you, "Well, no, I c- it doesn't seem right, doesn't seem right." It's like Maverick at the end of, uh, the old Top Gun, right? He's not engaging. It doesn't seem right. No. He keeps saying, "Talk to me, Goose. Talk to me, Goose." Doesn't feel right. Meanwhile, everybody's chirping in his ear, "Come on, Maverick, get engaged. Engage, goddammit. Come on, Maverick!” And finally, he just goes and does it. So why don't I just go and do it? I don't know. But what I do know is that making the perfect the enemy of the good is a characteristic that leads to the topic of today's episode, which is progress, not perfection. Humans don't like to fail. They don't like to look like they're failing. They don't like to even give the impression that they're incapable of doing whatever. Guilty as charged. And if you think about some of the things that you don't do, like there are reasons that you don't go in some places by yourself. They might be safety reasons, and those are legit. But to say, "Oh, I'm afraid everybody's gonna look at me. I'm afraid, I'm afraid that I'm gonna be judged," those are excuses that we tell ourselves so that we don't have to confront the fear of the things we just mentioned to ourselves. "Oh, I don't, I don't look right.”, “I'm not dressed for the occasion.”, “I'm not as good-looking as some of those people.”, “My hair doesn't look right.”, “I'm a little heavy. I'm too thin.", Once again, that is the perfect being the enemy of the good. Now I'm gonna go back to third grade. In third grade, I was a little scrawny little kid with a hair-trigger temper who knew how to sing, and people knew I knew how to sing. I didn't know how to ignore people who made fun of my last name, but I sure as hell knew how to sing. The very last day of third grade, there was a talent show. The whole school was very surprised when I walked out and started singing a Three Dog Night song, "Joy To The World.", “Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine.”, and you know how the rest of that goes. So I had to progress to the point where I was in a position to actually start singing. If I don't start a process, the odds are I'll never get into the process and have a shot at reaching the end of a process, because as we all know, a process has a beginning, a middle, and an end, right? So this whole busking thing, playing in public, what am I doing? Procrastinating, finding excuses, self-talk on the negative side instead of the positive side, not giving myself a chance to actually go out and experience and possibly learn. Why do we do that to ourselves? I don't know why you do it. I know why I do it. I do it because I'm afraid. Nothing wrong with being afraid. Everybody's got fear that they deal with. I'm not special, and neither are you. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid to take a chance, because what if I fail? What if I mess up while I'm playing guitar, and then I mess up the words while I'm trying to sing? And what if the equipment doesn't work? And what if, what if, what if? All those what ifs have something in common, they're all inside of my head. We can think anything that we want. You can sail the Grand Canyon without any kind of propulsion, you can fly like Peter Pan. You can do a lot of things in your head, but when you start trying to do something, when you actually have to put pen to paper, foot to road, path towards destination, well, there, there is the rub, isn't it? The challenge is you have to prove you can do something. You can think anything that you want, but you have to prove in order for anyone else to say, "Oh, yeah, you can do that," even yourself. You ever said that to yourself? "See? I knew I could do that." Why? Why do you not say that to yourself? Well, you lack the confidence 'cause you can't see the end of the process. That's fair. But who can? Nobody. Solution? Easy. Think this way: progress, not perfection. Progress, meaning once you get started, you have to keep going. You could stop at any time, but then you have a place to start from because you had already started before. How many of you have looked at a sink full of dishes and said, "I need to get the dishes in the dishwasher," and you only get half of them in, and then you say, "I can't do any more"? What happens to those other dishes, they sit in the sink. What happens to you? Well, you're distracted by this, that, or the other thing, but those dishes will sit there and wait for you to come back, 'cause they're not gonna get in the dishwasher by themselves. So when you come back and you go, "God, I s-- I gotta finish this," you have progressed to a point. Now you need to progress to another point. You're on a hike. It's a three-mile hike. You get a third of the way through it, and it's like, "I, I can't do this." Well, stop and rest. Do you continue or do you quit? If you quit, do you come back to this hike, pick up where you left off? That's progress, not perfection. So you're at the golf course and you're ready to tee off on the fifth hole and slice it wickedly out of bounds and into the blackberry bushes. Does that mean the whole round is in the crapper? No, because you're in process, and the next ball that you're going to hit will be a progression of that process. You dig out another ball, and lo and behold, you keep your head down and keep your left arm straight and, oh, look at that, Bing, in the air, and it goes as far as it goes. But at least you can see it. What would happen if we changed our mindset to thinking about how far we can go rather than telling ourselves we can't do something? What would happen? Well, we'd fail. Inevitably, at something, we'd fail. Okay, so what then? Do you just give up? Giving up is never really a good solution because you'll be stuck with the thought of, "What if I would have kept on trying?”, “What if I would have applied what I learned from failing and didn't make the same moves and got further towards whatever it was I was trying to do?”, “What if I thought about putting more energy into progress rather than worrying about the end to decide whether it's perfect or not?" You're a human being just like me, not perfect. Humans inherently are not perfect beings. So what's the rub here? To try and fail is nothing more than a learning experience, isn't it? You've done it before. How do you think you made it from first to second to third to fifth to tenth to graduation? All those grades, did you fail? Maybe. Did you stop? No, you didn't. And if you stopped, why did you stop? And if you figure out why you stopped, why can't you restart? The only barrier to you succeeding is you. The only thing stopping you from finding more progress in whatever you're trying to do is you. We have a bad habit of talking ourselves out of trying things because we don't wanna fail. And you have to realize failing is how we learn. I've said it in other episodes. “We don't learn how to walk, we learn how not to fall down as much anymore.”, and I don't know about you, but I don't fall down very much. But if you look at a toddler, they fall down all the time. Soon they learn how to not fall down, then they learn how to run and all sorts of other things. That's the key to life. You have to keep trying. You have to keep progressing. The goal has to be how much farther can I get, not whether you can do it or not. Think about it. Think about it with something simple, something you already know how to do, like brushing your teeth. When's the last time you didn't finish brushing your teeth, huh? When's the last time you didn't finish tying a shoelace? When's the last time you didn't finish something? Think about why you didn't finish it. Can you pick up where you left off and then finish it? Bet you can, if you give yourself a chance. Stop looking at the destination and look at the journey, 'cause it's more about how far we've come than how far we've gotten. The time spent has been spent, you might as well use it to your advantage, don't you think? I'm telling myself this, but I'm talking to you!! The past never changes. The future always can, depending on actions taken in the present, and thinking is part of that process. But you have to put your thought into action, because action does things. So go, do things, try things. If they don't work, what'd you lose? What'd you learn? The more you know, the more you can do. That's a fact. Don't think so? Try listening to this episode again and see how far you can progress. You don't have to be perfect at anything except making progress. Because if you're not making progress, what are you doing? Thanks a lot for listening this week. I really appreciate it. Go out and do something and do it now, because later you wanna be doing something else. I'll see ya, bye!!!