Progress Over Perfection

Hello and welcome back to the blog! Today is actually my birthday and I am also celebrating finishing pharmacy school. I recently came upon this concept of the 85 percent solution which I recently read about in the book I Will Teach You to Be Rich, Second Edition by Ramit Sethi. This is an amazing personal finance book that serves as a great book for anyone looking to cover the basics and still live a good life in the process of being financially responsible based on their circumstances and goals.

Now the reason I want to talk about the 85 percent solution is that like it says in the book. “Too many people including myself think we need to manage our money perfectly, which leads us to do nothing at all.” But it is far greater to be good enough or 85 percent of the way there than to do nothing at all. This is a common theme that leads to analysis paralysis when we do many things including money. I remember when I didn’t want to go to the gym because I was scared of looking dumb in front of everyone. But it is ok to make mistakes especially early on so that in the future you can adjust. 

One of my favorite stories from Atomics Habits is the story of the photography class. I have linked the story here but basically, there was a “quantity” group graded on the amount of work produced (100 photos = A, 90 photos = B, and 80 photos = C, etc). Then there was a quality group that had to produce one photo but it had to be excellent to get an A. By the end of the term, the quantity group had better photos overall because they were able to experiment and adjust from their mistakes. 

Perfectionism is one of the many struggles that we all face on a daily basis because we are too focused on the goal itself as opposed to the system that can help us achieve our goal. So once you have identified your goal how do you create a system that will allow you to get more practice? How do you lower the bar so that you look for 85% over 100% so that you can learn from your mistakes and get started? These are great questions to ask whenever you want to do anything new.