The Mindset Mentor - Why Your Perfectionism is Destroying Your Productivity

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

You can be a perfectionist or you can be productive, but you can't be both. In this episode, I am going to talk to you about how to get rid of your perfectionism so that you can be more productive. Follow me on IG here: https://instagram.com/robdialjr Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

On holiday, there's nothing like doing nothing. As an Expedia member, you can save up to 30% when you add a hotel to your flight, so you can go out there with great ambition to do absolutely nothing for less. Expedia, made to travel. Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you have not yet done so, please give me a rating and review for this podcast on iTunes or however you listen to us. It helps more than you could possibly know because the more reviews that come through that are positive, the more that they actually show this to other people organically and the more that this grows. So if you would do that,

I would greatly, greatly appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. Today, we're going to be talking about how your perfectionism is destroying, destroying your productivity. And not too long ago, I did an episode on perfectionism specifically and how perfectionism is complete BS. Today, I'm going to talk about how that perfectionism is literally killing the productivity that you need to have in order to create the life that you want. But let me give you a real quick overview of what that episode is about. 60 seconds. Here we go.

Your perfectionism is not real. There is no such thing as being a perfectionist. A perfectionism itself is a mask that you are wearing for your fears, right? What's really the truth about perfectionism is you're afraid of being judged or not being good enough or your paintings not being good enough or your music not being good enough or your photos not being good enough compared to other people and maybe some judgment or maybe a lack of acceptance, right? So you hide behind, and not just you, we all do this until we become aware of it. You hide behind your mask of, I'm a perfectionist.

That's why I haven't put it out yet because I want to make sure that I'm perfect. And you hide behind that instead of actually putting it out there. So an example of what I'm talking about with perfectionism is if you're an artist, you're painting and you're making all these beautiful things, there's so many artists that are some of the best artists in the world that will never be seen because they are too afraid of putting their art out there. So they have closets and closets and closets and storage units full of amazing paintings that people would pay tons of freaking money for, but they're too afraid because it's not quote unquote perfect.

When in reality, what they're really afraid of is doing a show and being so proud of themselves. And they have all of their paintings up and they walk by and they hear somebody say, that's $5,000. I wouldn't pay $50 for that. And that's what they're afraid of. They're afraid of that little bit of rejection of not being good enough, not being smart enough. The soul that you have of being an artist is not good enough. And so the thing that I know about artists is if you see a really great artist, what you'll actually see is you will find someone who knows that their art will never be perfect. Let me say that again. When you see a really incredible artist, what you're actually seeing is somebody who knows that their art will

never be perfect. So whatever it is that you are afraid of that is causing you to be a perfectionist, whether it's art, maybe it is art, maybe it's music, maybe it's painting, maybe it's, you know, just getting up and giving a speech in front of people. Maybe it's writing an article. There's something inside of you that's waiting to be brought out to the world, but you're too afraid to bring it out. And that perfectionism is killing your productivity. It's killing your productivity because you're waiting for the perfect moment. You're waiting for your stuff to be perfect. And we all know that it will never be perfect. Perfection does not exist anywhere in this universe. The only thing that's perfect is imperfection. That's really what the truth is. So you're not taking action because it's not the perfect time, because your

paintings aren't perfect, because your writing's not perfect, because your body's not perfect, whatever it is that you're holding back from the world. Meanwhile, there's somebody else in this world that has less talent than you, that has less skill than you, that is getting ahead of you simply because they're taking action and you're not. Let me say that again. There's someone in this world who has less talent than you and has less skill than you at whatever it is that you're talented or skilled at. And they're getting ahead of you with less talent and less skill simply because they're taking action and you're not. Let that one sink in for a second. What if you never take action? What you have to do is you have to figure out a way to

get better every single day, right? You don't strive for perfection. What you strive for is progress. Can you just be a little bit better today than you were yesterday? Can you be 1% better today than you were yesterday? Can you get your stuff a little bit better? Can you progress a little bit more? Can you start bringing your stuff out a little bit more? So instead of putting your paintings, you know, if we just go with the painting example, because obviously I'm on this example for some reason, I don't know why, but you know, let's say you put your painting up on the wall and you're painting something instead of doing a show. What if you were to just do a time-lapse of you painting that thing and put it up on Instagram or put up on Facebook and just see what people say.

I guarantee you this. We make things out in our heads to be way worse than they actually are. You would be so surprised by people's response to seeing whatever it is that you're doing. We'd make it out to be so much worse than it actually is. Right? I remember before I started making videos, even though I had over 10,000 hours of public speaking experience, there's a difference between public speaking experience and speaking to a camera when there's nobody and no faces and no reactions that you can see. I have many friends who are incredible public speakers, but they struggle getting going and

creating video, right? If you're out there and maybe you want to be a speaker, maybe you want to be a motivational speaker, maybe you want to be a coach or whatever it is. Maybe you just want to just do spoken word. I don't know what it is. What if you just took a video and just decided to put it up? I guarantee you what you think people's perception and what they would say to you is way different than it actually will be because we always make things out to be way worse than it ever will be, right? It will never be perfect. That's okay. Getting something done is better than continuing to work on something because it's not perfect yet. Done is always better than perfect. I always tell my

team members, I always tell my people who work for me, I'd rather them put something out at 90% than 100%. There's so many times that I've said this to people in my team. I'd rather you put something out at 90% perfect than 100% perfect. Why? Because I know number one, it will never get to 100% perfect. And that little extra 10% between 90 and 100 is the rest of your life. I'd rather somebody put something out that's good enough than something that's perfect. You just got to get it out. You just got to put it out. Because I promise you, if you're striving for perfection, you are never going to reach it. And it's just going to be a massive disappointment. In 2021, a truly diversified

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prefer long-term growth through appreciation, Fundrise makes investing in private real estate as easy as investing in stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. So see for yourself why 150,000 investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started, go to fundrise.com slash dial today. That is F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E dot com slash D-I-A-L fundrise.com slash dial. It's literally the difference in life of trying to get your entire to-do list done versus just knocking off the most important things. How many people listen to my voice right now? You stress out when you see your to-do list because you know that you need to get that entire to-do list done, right? When I have a to-do list, it's like 40, 45 things long because there's so many aspects of things that I need to do, parts of my business, all of that stuff.

What if you stopped looking at your entire to-do list and you just circled your most important thing and said, I just got to do this? Because your most important thing is your most important thing. So if you get the most important thing done, isn't that at least going to get you much further ahead than anything else? It will. Let me give you a real quick secret about to-do lists just so you know, this is what I do. I make a to-do list. If you've ever heard me say this, I literally did this on a live the other day. I was on a Facebook live or a zoom call. There was a ton of people that were there and I literally took out my three by five card to show them this is actually what I do. I practice what I preach.

I'll make a to-do list and it's freaking massive. It's always massive. My to-do lists are never something that's small. But I don't care about getting the entire to-do list done. I actually know that I'm probably not going to get anywhere near the entire to-do list done. What I do is let's say I have a to-do list of 45 things. I'll go through and I'll circle

the three most important things on that to-do list. And then what I'll do is I will take them and write them on a three by five card and I'll put them in my back pocket. And all I have to do that day is get those three things accomplished. That's it. Imagine if you just get your three most important things done every single day. That's over a thousand important things over the course of a year, right? But the average person who's a quote unquote perfectionist looks at this entire to-do list and is actually gets paralysis by analysis and they can't do anything because that list looks so long and they've got to get everything done because they're a perfectionist. No, I just got to get my most important things done. That's it. You have to have a different type of attitude in order to get stuff done. You have to have the GSD attitude,

which is the get shit done attitude, right? You've got to stop thinking. You've got to start doing, right? Stop thinking, start doing. You will never be fully ready for anything and you don't have to believe in yourself in order to take action. That's one of the beautiful things about taking action is you don't have to believe in yourself in any sort of way to just get it done anyways. You just got to start moving. You don't have to worry about the journey of a thousand miles. You just got to take the next step and then the next step and the next step, and you'll never take a perfect step, but that's okay. You have to mess up. You have to learn by messing up, right? The creator of Honda says success is 99% failure.

You just got to succeed that one time, but you got to realize that you're going to mess up. Like I'm fully aware that I'm a bubbling fool most of the day. And I'm just, I'm fully aware that I'm going to mess things up. I'm going to screw things up every single day, multiple times a day. I'm going to screw stuff up. I'm going to bump into walls. I'm going to screw things up. I'm going to send the wrong email to the wrong person. I'm going to create a crappy podcast, whatever it is that I happen. I'm just going to mess things up, but I want to send the wrong email to the wrong person. I'm going to create a crappy podcast. Whatever it is that I happen, I'm just going to mess things up. But I want to get the messing up out of the way. Because when I mess up is how I figure out how I can do it the right way, right?

I go, oh, that way didn't work. Oh, that way didn't work. Oh, that way didn't work. Oh, this way did work. And being completely honest, perfectionism, if I'm being honest with you, is usually just a case of a frail ego. Let that one sing in for a second. Perfectionism happens to be a case of frail ego.

Is I don't want to put this out because I have such a frail ego. I can't handle somebody saying they don't like this. I can't handle somebody else's opinion. I can't handle rejection. handle somebody else's opinion. I can't handle rejection. I can't handle that if Sally in accounting sees my video of my first motivational video that I decided to put out of my first poetry of spoken word. And she's like, this sucks. I can't handle somebody saying that to me. That's a frail ego. And it's okay because your ego, most people's ego is quite frail until they recognize it and they start building it up, right? You will never be perfect. And let me just

give you a real quick, you know, I guess this might help you out a little bit. Nothing in this world will ever be perfect. There's no such thing as perfection, right? If you look out, walk outside and tell me what is perfect about everything that you see, right? There's no perfect tree. There's no perfect blade of grass. There's no perfect bird. So how could you expect to be perfect in any sort of way if you are part of nature? Like we look at nature and think that, oh, well, I'm a human and I'm different from nature. No, you come from nature. We are nature. We have a symbiotic relationship with nature. We breathe out carbon dioxide. Trees take it. They turn it into oxygen. We breathe the oxygen. We have a symbiotic relationship with nature. We breathe out carbon dioxide. Trees take it. They turn it into oxygen. We breathe the oxygen. We have a symbiotic relationship. We are nature. So if you look at, you wouldn't walk up to a tree and be like, oh,

that tree's fat. Oh, that tree's skinny. Oh, that tree's crooked. It's not perfect. You don't look at a tree and judge a tree because it's not perfect. Because we understand that there will never be a perfect tree. There will never be a perfect blade of grass. We just planted last Sunday. We just planted hibiscus. And all of these hibiscus started blooming. And I look at them and they're not perfect.

They have little veins and cracks in them. And they're this beautiful pink color. But then there's a messed up leaf that they have. They're not perfect. But I don't expect the hibiscus flower to be perfect. So why would I expect myself to be perfect when I come from nature? I will never be perfect. And the quicker that I realized that the quicker I can go, all right, well now I just got to go and get some shit done, right? There will never be anything that's perfect. You're not going to be perfect.

There's no such thing as perfection. Go fuck some things up, buttercup. It's the way it's going to be. It's the only way to improve is go and mess some stuff up. Go throw some stuff at the wall, see what works and what doesn't. Incorrect action is always better than no action at all. Let me say that again. Incorrect action is always better than no action at all because enough incorrect action will eventually uncover what needs to change in order to make it correct action. But if you're just sitting around just hoping that you're going to figure it out and figure out life and make yourself perfect by not taking the correct action, I'm just going to be honest with you, you're delusional because you'll never be able to figure out what that is. The only way to figure out what the right path is or the right thing to

do or the way to be quote unquote perfect or as close to as possible is to go out there and mess stuff up. That's the only way that you can do it. You just have to get going. You just have to get moving. And eventually what you'll find along this path is that you'll mess up so much that you become okay with messing up. And you actually realize that messing up is the most important part of getting to where you want to go, right? It's like a baby that's starting to walk. The only way that a baby learns how to walk is by falling over and realizing that's not the right way. Ooh, that's not the right way. And they're not consciously thinking, Ooh, I got to put a little bit more weight on my right foot. I got this big

old chunky left leg. I got to try to move it. My thighs are kind of sliding against each other because I'm such a chunky little bit. They're not thinking all of these things. They're not thinking, oh, I got to put a little bit more weight here. Oh, I was leaning back too far. What they do is they stand up and they fall and they stand up and they fall and they stand up and they fall and they stand up and they fall and they stand up and they fall. And eventually, after falling and falling and falling and falling and falling, they start to figure out subconsciously, their muscles start to figure out, oh, this is the way that you stay, right? The way that you never expect a child to just be able to perfectly walk is how you have to understand that in order to start walking,

you've got to mess up a lot. You'll never be perfect unless you start messing up. So that's why incorrect action is always better than no action at all. Every single time. I would rather somebody on my team mess up and mess up and mess up than just sit there on the sideline and hope that one day that they're going to figure it out. You got to get going. You got to get moving. You got to get past the worry of other people's opinions of you, of not being perfect, of this perfectionism, because this perfectionism is literally killing your productivity. And you have to be productive. You have to get stuff done in order to create the life that you want to.

So what do you do? You get moving. And you mess up. And you'll be okay with it. So what do I have to say? Go get moving. Stop listening to me. Stop listening to me right now.

Turn me off if you need to and go get some shit done. It's time to take action. It's time to stop judging yourself. It's time to start thinking that you're not good enough. It's time to stop thinking that you're going to be perfect. Just get a little bit better every single day. And if you do that, one day you wake up and you'll be a completely different person years from now than you currently are with the life that you want. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it with someone that you know and love.

Please share us on your Instagram stories. Take a screenshot or take a video of you talking about it, whatever it is, and tag me in it. Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. As I always say, the only way that we grow is from you guys sharing these podcast episodes. So I greatly appreciate it every single time that you share it. It's the reason why we're always in the top 200 podcasts

in the entire world. And I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode, make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.