• All or Nothing? What about Anything?

    by Alexander Becker on August 24, 2006 | Link

    When it comes to making big decisions at the crossroads of your life, take an all or nothing approach, choose absolute perfection. Go with the extremes and benefit from your willpower and the discipline you develop on the way.

    When it comes, on the other hand, to dealing with comparably minor decisions and problems and their solutions, it is often extremely efficient to take the opposite direction and use different methods. Most so called perfect plans are vastly changed, even trashed on the first day of their planned execution. Why even attempt and make the effort to plan perfectly?

    When you have 70% of what you need to act, it's time to act now. Waiting for that last 30% rarely changes the outcome, and you will miss opportunities while you wait.

    The magic is the idea behind fuzzy logic. Michael Powell's 70% of what you have, the imperfect, the incomplete, the half-manifested, is what you need to start that will make all the difference in the long run.

    The main and most important difference between 70% and a full 100% is time. Time that is lost waiting. Time that can be used and filled with action and results while gathering valuable experiences.

    Everything less than perfect to any arbitrary percentage, 70%, 50%, even 25% perfect, is better than nothing or zero percent. A diet that is easy to follow being 80% healthy is better than a diet that is 100% healthy in theory but which no one is able to follow in real life. The same goes for nutrition, exercises, beauty, and saving and investing money, to list but a few examples.

    The saying that even a bad decision is better than no decision at all, or the pedagogical maxim of certainty, even if to be corrected later, being always preferable to uncertainty -- shall guide us on the way to perfection and perfect plans to achieve perfect outcomes.

    It is very much possible that the most imperfect, roughly sketched plan, a plan that you would never trust to further your precious idea, will be the only one to result in the perfection you always desired. Employ imperfections and get results enhanced with divine details.

    Many decisions and processes that potentially influence and shape your future can be safely based on less than complete certainty -- if you allow it. Always strive for perfection but let go of the paralysis that is often involved. There are too many moving targets in knowledge and in time to wait for the ideal 100%.

    Continually generate ideas to make the best use of what you currently have in order to evolve. The key is to grow, to make progress and to move as fast and as precise as currently possible. Move, even if it means to literally crawl like a reptile or to move in funny ways like an insect, move if it means moving with less than 100% efficiency, but move and evolve.

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