Are you focusing on perfection, progress or practice?

The modern chorus of personal improvement is about focusing on progress, not perfection.

Thousands of therapists, coaches, researchers and psychologists have been telling us for years that defining success as perfection is a recipe for failure. And all that really matters is that we move forward.

But what happens when even that doesn’t happen? What if progress isn’t even on the table? Does that mean we’ve failed and our attempts for that day don’t count?

Not at all. I’m personally a huge fan of doing something every day to keep moving the story forward, but as we think about human development, it’s important to do so with an updated understanding of our imperfect nature and the many challenges of daily living.

Because sometimes we show up to do our work and don’t make progress for shit. Sometimes we sit down for hours and don’t advance the ball downfield one iota. Sometimes we take two steps back from where we started, and it feels like the opposite of progress.

And that’s okay. What matters is the practice.

My yoga teacher used to say that it’s about the commitment to seeking what is fresh, spontaneous and interesting in the same place we looked for it yesterday. We don’t have to put all this pressure on ourselves to be better than we used to be. Showing up for today is enough.

Maybe we make progress, maybe we don’t. But there is no reason to berate ourselves just because we didn’t advance.

The tricky part is, it’s very difficult to make the case for practice over progress in our highly results oriented culture.

Because most of us are evaluated against our outcomes. We are measured against the preconceptions of what we think should be happening or not happening.

But lest we forget, nobody actually knows anything. Everybody’s just guessing. About everything.

And so, who’s to say what progress even means?

Basecamp, the software company that has been profitable from their first day in business, writes about this philosophy in their book:

Our goal is no goals. It would be disingenuous for us to pretend we care about a number we just made up. Let’s face it, goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets. They’re made up numbers that function as a source of unnecessary stress until they’re either achieved or abandoned. And when that happens, you’re supposed to pick new ones and start stressing again.

Think about which of these ideas you focus on. Perfection, progress or practice?

And here’s the secret. The first one is utterly impossible. The second one is occasionally improbable. Which leaves us with the third, practice, which is always attainable.

We can still show up no matter what.

In my thirty years of songwriting, there have been countless composing sessions where I sat down to play my guitar, and after thirty minutes, not a goddamn thing happened.

Oh sure, there was a barrage of notes coming off my strings, but nothing worth recording. In short, there was zero progress.

But it took me years to realize that that didn’t make my session a failure. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad, it just was.

That’s the reality of the creative experience. It will crack on regardless of the preconceptions and expectations we have about what we think should be happening.

All we can control is the story we tell ourselves about the journey.

What happens when progress doesn’t happen?