Because there are very few people in the world who are genuine perfectionists.
Like people always say, “I'm a perfectionist,
that's why, it's my problem, I'm a perfectionist”. There are, in my experience, there are a tiny,
tiny percentage of people in the world who are actually perfectionists.
The rest of them are disguising cowardice as perfectionism.
Just start. If right now
you are in a position where you have an idea, you have something you want to do,
just start, do something. There's this terrible perfectionist mindset
that we have in our culture, that unless I'm ready,
unless I'm completely ready, I'm not going to do it.
We have to be in a position where we say, “I'll never be completely ready,
I have to find a way to start now” “Even if I go back to that thin slicing concept,
what’s the first thing I can do?”.
“What's the first thing I can do?” And you know, what's funny?
There's this whole, perfectionism is a joke.
Because there are very few people in the world who are genuine perfectionists.
Like people always say, “I'm a perfectionist,
that's why, it's my problem, I'm a perfectionist”. There are, in my experience, there are a tiny,
tiny percentage of people in the world who are actually perfectionists.
The rest of them are disguising cowardice as perfectionism.
It's like saying, “there's someone I'm attracted to over here,
I'll do it when I'm ready”. And we can say that we're waiting to get ready,
or we could be honest and say, “I'm just being a complete coward right now”.
That's the choice we make. And so what happens is when people make it about,
“well, I'm not ready yet, I need to make sure it's perfect”.
They're making it about something else, they're making it about circumstances
when actually we have to make it about an identity issue.
Who do I want to be in life? Well, I want to be someone who takes action,
I want to be someone who takes charge,
I want to be someone who pushes forward no matter what.
Can I do that right now if I'm being a coward about not starting something?
No. All right, so let's start.
And there's a very good friend of mine who's a known writer in London,
wrote some amazing plays for the West and done some incredible things,
he said, we were having this interesting conversation the other day,
and he said, “when as a writer, you get writer's block,
one of the things they teach you is to lower your standards”.
If you get writer's block, lower your standards for what you're expecting of yourself.
And that’s kind of cool. In order to get over our writer's block
or any block in life,
we need to initially lower our standards a little bit.
How can I lower my standards in order to get started?
Next, take every opportunity seriously. Take every opportunity seriously.
There are many instances where I see people just not capitalizing
on the little opportunities that are around them,
and it's because they're kind of being too discerning about what's what.
If someone is interested in what you do and wants a meeting,
have the meeting. If there's somewhere
you can go just to suss something out, go. If there's someone you think might be worth
calling, call them. In the beginning,
take every opportunity seriously. When I work with new business people
there’s something I find time and time again, and it's that they've completely underrated
the value of selling. Whatever you do,
whatever business you're looking to run, whatever market you're looking to be in,
learn to sell. Get really, really good at it.
And one of the things I see is people as soon as they
can delegate sales, they delegate sales. As soon as they can remove themselves from that,
they remove themselves, “because I don't want to be involved in selling,
I just want to be involved in preping up the product”,
putting some more bells and whistles on it, doesn't even need them.
Just doing a few extra things, “oh there’s some paperwork to do,
oh there’s other things to do”. What I see everywhere is what
we call avoidance activity.
Avoidance activity. Avoidance activity is,
I'm going to do everything else, except the one thing I really should do.
But we have to identify what’s the thing that's going to get me there,
what’s the thing that's going to get me there the most
and not have that arrogance that I'm somehow above sales,
we're never above sales, and no matter how big your business gets,
you're still never above sales. And in addition, sales, the funny
thing is, you're not just selling the product, you're selling yourself, you're selling yourself.
I truly believe selling yourself to be one of the most important skills
you can ever learn in your whole life. I think it's everything.
Whether it's attraction, you're focusing on, whether it's business you're focusing on,
I think selling yourself is the most important thing you can ever learn.