perfection is the enemy of progress

avoiding vision board goggles in 2025

There’s a popular saying that goes, “Good is the enemy of great”. Don’t settle, strive for greatness, yaddah yaddah.

It’s a perfectly fine expression.

Unless you’re a perfectionist.

If you’re a perfectionist, this comes pre-downloaded. For everyone else, it’s a seemingly innocuous axiom. For perfectionists, it’s six words that sum up the bane of your existence.

Instead, I offer an alternative:

”Perfect is the enemy of progress”

With the end of the year approaching, we’re all pulling out our vision boards, going buck-wild on Pinterest, and imagining all the ways our lives are going to become a living, breathing reflection of said boards. But when we fall short, we feel like failures. But the only failure really happening is the failure to see everything that DID happen, blinded by an ideal that doesn’t even exist.

I call it vision board goggles.

What magic do we miss when we compare our lives, not to that of others, but to the idea in our minds of what it should look like?

I can say this because I know—I am a perfectionist. And not in a cute, “my greatest weakness is that I’m a perfectionist” at a job interview kind of way. In more of a, “it’s the single thing that has ruined my life the most”, kind of way.

I grew up how I can only assume most perfectionists do: in a household where achievement was how you got attention. My dad would often say “That’s what happens when you don’t do your math” whenever we saw a homeless person (to be generous to my dad, I can only imagine the version of this he was exposed to, which I surely only received the crumbs of). To make matters worse, I grew up in a society that only perpetuated these ideas: constantly being evaluated and ranked amongst my peers in school, only to be taken into the stratosphere by the emergence of social media, “top 8”’s, likes, and comments. Where a literal virtual pissing match started over who could make their life seem the most perfect.

And I did a great job. For the most part, I was winning the pissing match.

Huzzah for me.

But the problem was, I only did things I knew I would be good at. And if I wasn’t, I would find a way to make it look like I was good (I cannot confirm nor deny that I cheated in every math and science class I ever took).

Then when I did ultimately fail at something, it was catastrophic.

In the wake of these failures, I became incredibly stuck. Intellectually, I understood the concept of failure actually being a good thing—the more often you fail the higher you climb—but I couldn’t bring myself to actually put it into practice. The fear of failure left me paralyzed, leaving me to live so many years of my precious life with concrete shoes on. Too scared to do things imperfectly, of fucking everything up and falling flat on my face, that I did nothing at all.

That’s what I mean when I say I know for a fact that perfection is the enemy of progress.

So please, keep this in mind as you’re making vision boards and setting intentions for 2025—don’t let not achieving the exact thing you had in mind keep you from some alternate, possibly better version of it. Don’t feel like if your year wasn’t an exact replication of your vision board, that it was a shitty year. You can’t see the stars if you’re always looking for the sun.

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