Progress Beats Perfection Every Time

Doing your best work matters. Waiting for perfect can become a different problem entirely.

I've delayed projects because I kept polishing after the work had already reached the point where it was useful, valuable, and ready to help someone. The extra work felt productive, but often it was giving me very little return.

That's the distinction I make now between quality and perfectionism. A book, course, website, or other product needs to be good enough to deliver real value. It needs to be accurate enough for the stakes involved. But not everything requires endless revision before it can be released.

I've learned to finish more, get the work into the world, evaluate what happens, and improve when improvement is actually needed. That approach has helped me with books, affiliate websites, and building Your Life Systems.

The point isn't to lower your standards. It's to recognize when the search for perfection has stopped improving the work and started delaying progress.

In this lesson, I explain how I think about good enough, diminishing returns, finishing, and why progress compounds once you give yourself something real to learn from.

In This Lesson

·        Why chasing perfection can keep you from starting or publishing

·        How perfectionism can become a form of procrastination

·        Why good enough still requires useful, high-quality work

·        How diminishing returns can make endless polishing expensive

·        Why the required standard depends on what you're creating

·        What publishing books taught me about finishing and revising

·        How the same lesson applies to websites, courses, and Your Life Systems

·        Why finished work creates opportunities to learn and improve

·        How progress compounds after you get moving

Watch the video or read the complete transcript below.

Progress Beats Perfection Every Time

(Transcript edited for clarity.)

Hi, I'm Wes. Welcome to Progress Beats Perfection Every Time.

So many of us are taught from a very young age that we need to seek perfection.

This needs to be perfect.

It even starts, I think, maybe in kindergarten. I remember everybody wanted to color inside the lines.

There was some goal that you needed to learn to color inside the lines.

Well, I was never good at coloring inside the lines. Even now, I struggle.

I don't really color, but as my kids were growing up, I would color with them. They quickly got to where they could color better than I could.

It was never important to me.

They learned how to color inside the lines and make this beautiful colored picture, and I'd be over there struggling with a little thing here, a little thing there.

I never could get it as good as they could. In fact, no one would ever mistake anything I colored for perfection.

Now, this isn't about coloring.

This is about progress beats perfection every time.

Here's a few problems with perfection.

I'm not telling you not to seek perfection. I want to make that very clear.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to do your best work.

What I'm saying is there are dangers in chasing perfection.

The biggest danger in chasing perfection is you never start.

You want to be perfect before you start.

I recently did another presentation or video about taking action and starting. You should watch that if you struggle with that because that's not really what this is about.

But that is something that chasing perfection causes a problem with.

If you chase perfection, you never start or you never present whatever it is to the world.

Perfection often feels productive.

But is it really productive?

Is perfection productive?

Often, it's another form of procrastination: chasing perfection instead of actually taking action and putting whatever it is out in the world.

I think along the lines of business a lot.

Often, you work on a product.

It can be any type of product. It could be a book or a video course or an app or a piece of software or whatever.

And you keep working.

I know I've written books.

Often, you write the book, then you'll go through it, and you'll have an editor look at it.

You keep going through it and keep searching for perfection.

"This is not good enough," or, "Maybe I should add this here."

And it's important.

If you're going to write a book that you hope someone will pay for, read, and use, it needs to have a certain level of perfection.

It needs to be good enough.

But what I've found is once it reaches the good enough level, it's what I call diminishing returns beyond that.

You can spend months editing and trying to make it better and better and get almost no real return out of making it that much better.

Now, if you're writing a scientific textbook or something, that's a little different from what I'm talking about.

It might need to be perfect.

It might need to be edited to death.

Because if you're writing something that deals with human lives and health and things like that, it's pretty important that it's right, right?

What I write about is often business, entrepreneurial ideas, or systems for businesses and for life, things like that.

What I've found is people tend to care much more about the value of the content than whether my grammar is perfect in 100% of the book.

Now, my goal is 100% perfect grammar because I don't want that to get in the way of people learning and using what I'm teaching or telling in the book.

But I've found that if the system I'm teaching in the book is effective and good, if my grammar is 99% correct, I don't lose anybody and they don't lose the value of what they're learning or reading.

Now, if it's full of typos and bad grammar, you can lose a lot of people.

I've bought books before that had some valuable stuff in them, and the grammar and punctuation and everything were so bad that I finally gave up.

There is a point that you have to reach.

The point is that perfection is not always the point you have to reach before you publish or get something out there.

Perfectionism usually creates delays, and that's why progress beats perfection almost every time.

I've delayed projects in the past directly because of this.

But my life changed when I learned that I needed to start before it was perfect because I'm not perfect.

Nothing I've ever done has been perfect.

I learned how to gauge good enough.

Again, I am not saying you need to do less than your best work.

You do need to do your best work, but you also need to learn when your best work is good enough instead of going for perfection, where you hit diminishing returns.

My life changed when I started finishing more and polishing later.

Now, let's talk about a book.

I've done both, but if you're submitting a manuscript for publication through a publishing company, you really aren't going to be able to make a bunch of revisions quickly.

If it's popular and it sells well and there's a second edition, you can change some things in it.

But if you're building a course that you're going to sell yourself, or you're self-publishing a book or something like that, you can literally change stuff a week later if there's something you need to change.

It's not always simple, but it can be done.

Depending on what you're doing, you can get started.

You can get your product or whatever it is out there.

You can stop trying to be perfect and start trying to help people with whatever your product does or solves.

Then make changes if you need to in the future.

I talked about publishing a book, so I've already given you one of my experiences in this area.

But I've also experienced this when I used to build affiliate websites.

It's even been part of building the Your Life Systems business.

Not everything has been perfect, but I took action because I know I need to get started so I can get to the next thing.

Then I evaluate everything and adjust.

That's the difference.

I'm seeking, eventually, as close to perfection as I can get while also understanding that I don't need perfection right now because I'll never get started if I keep seeking that.

So I get started.

I do the best I can.

I get it out there, then I evaluate, learn, and adjust.

Perfection is rarely required.

Think about what's holding you up right now in your life and in whatever your big goals are in life or in business.

Is perfection what you have to have, or is it something that's keeping you from taking the next step, from going live, from publishing, or putting whatever you've got out there?

Finished work creates opportunities.

It creates opportunities for you, and it creates opportunities for you to learn and improve.

Progress compounds.

Searching for perfection often keeps you from making progress.

Once you start making progress, that compounds.

You learn more.

You get better.

You improve.

So in closing, perfect rarely changes lives.

Finishing often does change your life.

I want you to remember this:

Progress matters more than perfection.

I'm Wes. This is Your Life Systems.

If this helped you, please subscribe and watch more videos.

Have a great day.

What's Next?

·        Identify one project where you're still polishing after it has become useful and ready.

·        Decide what good enough actually means for that specific project and its real-world stakes.

·        Separate necessary quality improvements from changes that are producing diminishing returns.

·        Finish or publish the work when it meets the standard you've chosen.

·        Use real feedback and results to decide what should be improved next.

·        Keep moving. Progress gives you information that perfectionism often cannot.

If you found this helpful: