How good do you have to be?
If you expect perfection, you only guarantee yourself failure.
Why? You’re a human being. Human beings make mistakes and sometimes they fail even with the best of intentions.
The goal should not be perfection.
The goal is to wake up tomorrow and do better than today. The goal is for June to be better than May. The goal is for 2015 is to be better than 2014.
The difference between you and a person more successful than you is that the successful person manages to be on point just a little bit more often than you are.
That’s it. It’s not a giant chasm of difference, but it’s enough so that if it’s repeated each and every day, it’s going to add up to a lot.
You might make the right financial choice 90% of the time, but if you make the right choice 91% of the time, you’ll be just a little bit more successful today… and a little more successful tomorrow, too. 
That’s the motivation. So our goal isn’t perfection.
Our goal is to move from the 90% person to the 91% person.
What does that mean?
- It means not beating ourselves up when we fail. Yes, we didn’t do things right. It does not mean we are a failure. It means we made a mistake.
- It means looking for the reasons for that mistake. Why did we make that mistake? What conditions caused it to happen? Every mistake we make happens for a reason. Mistakes aren’t a matter of personal failure. The mistakes we make are correctable if we are willing to sit back, study them, and find a better way of doing things.
- It means finding ways to not replicate that mistake the next time. Yes, we messed up today. That doesn’t mean we need to mess up in the same way ever again. If we recognize that mistake and what caused it, we can figure out a way to not have that mistake ever darken our door again.
We might not be perfect, but that doesn’t mean we have to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.
(How about just making new ones?!)
And with each day that passes, we can hope to slowly move from 90% to 91%. We don’t expect to be 100%.
91% will do!
If you try to get 1% better each day
- at your health,
- at your relationships and the way you treat people,
- at your creativity,
- and at turning despair into gratitude,
then that 1% compounds into an amazing person.
And 1% is so doable!
Maybe take that walk one more day this week?
Maybe take ten minutes to call someone you’ve been meaning to call?
Maybe make a weekly gratitude list if a daily one seems too much?
What 1% improvement would make your life better?
