Perfection can be the enemy of good

Striving for perfection should be the desire of every individual in every sphere of life. The innovations and technologies that are making life simpler today are a journey of years of striving for perfection by the human race. This is what perhaps distinguishes man from the monkey, as well as you and your neighbor. Your desire for perfection accords you abilities that either increase the gap between you and your neighbor with regard to finances, job positions, knowledge, happiness and many other desirable elements of life.

However, when desiring perfection becomes an obsession, one can sometimes throw away great ideas because they look at the journey to reaching perfection as a long one. But remember, perfection is a continuum, you don’t reach it overnight. There will always be room for doing things better but you have got to start with doing something.

You see, sometimes we start out with some fantastic goal in mind. “I am going to save and buy a lorry in three years”. “I am going to lose 10 kilogrammes of my weight this year—Ulayaclassics.” “I am going to get all of my financial problems sorted straight—I will have to count to ten before I decide to buy anything.” ‘I’m going to do this or that.”

I am quite guilty of this myself. I will often strive for some sort of financial perfection, but then I will find myself spending money on something unnecessary or I will forget some important financial task that needs to be done, even if it’s written in my diary. I will stop by the local shop to just see if they do have children school materials —but I end up coming out with a couple of toys I never intended to buy. Sometimes I have money and plan to find time and pay my water bill but somehow don’t find the perfect time —I then come home one day only to find the Water Board man on the meter trying to do what he knows best.

At certain times, it’s really tempting to tell yourself that you are a failure. That all of your hard work is really for naught because you still succumb to making mistakes – and sometimes, those mistakes are pretty sizeable ones. You will beat yourself up over a mistake, you will believe you are a failure, and will wonder why you even bother. However, at those times, you need to just remember one key thing: to be perfect is the enemy of the good.

Mistakes are not failures. Mistakes are a step or two backward on a journey of a thousand miles, one in which you have already progressed a long way. Even after a mistake, you still have made a lot of progress from where you have started. More importantly, after a mistake, you have learned something about yourself and about the goal you are trying to achieve. And perhaps most important of all, mistakes are part of life. Everyone makes them, whether you see them or not.

Perfection demands a lack of mistakes, and when you set yourself up expecting perfection all the time, you are doomed to fail from the start. Success comes from recognizing that mistakes happen, that you can’t beat yourself up over them, and that you need to step back and learn from them. What is important, however, is never lose the lesson from each failure. Otherwise repeating the  mistake qualifies you into a club of fools.

You see, we take steps backward all the time and you could easily use that as a reason to give up and to define yourself as a failure. But when you look at where you were then and where you are now, you will realise that you have already come a long way on your personal finance journey and that your mistake is just a few steps backward after miles walking forward.

Blessed week-end to you and yours.