We all have a tendency to strive for perfection. But it’s often a trap that keeps us from reaping any rewards at all.

Case in point:

I used to write morning pages each day to clear my mental clutter and get ideas flowing for the day. And, like their creator, Julia Cameron prescribed, I did them longhand on 8.5″ x 11″ sheets of paper first thing upon waking.

But doing it this way took me nearly an hour each morning. Not a problem when I was laid off and unemployed, but quite difficult on a regular, full day when I also needed to cook breakfast, help my wife get ready for work at 5 am, and squeeze in a workout.

That was hard enough, but life made it harder.

After I left my two-week ICU stay in 2020 and went home to recover from COVID-19, I found myself dealing with horrible inflammatory issues all throughout my body, including my hands and wrists. This made it difficult, if not impossible, to do much writing by hand.

So I stopped writing morning pages. And as a result, I lost all the benefits of that wonderful mental decluttering each morning and the ease with which new ideas flowed.

I tried here and there to dive back into morning pages—the right way, by hand—for years, but never managed more than a few days before I quit. Frustration, or pain, stopped me from continuing.

But in the back of my mind, I always knew there was a simple solution to this: just type your morning pages out on your computer! Rather than mangle my hands or suffer through a slow hour of writing I didn’t have, I could just type them.

But I resisted, because it wasn’t the right way to do morning pages. Julia was very explicit.

I let perfection prevent me from doing anything at all, when something, however imperfect, would have been better than nothing. By refusing to do them any way other than “perfectly,” I was missing out on 100% of the benefits of the process itself.

Doing no morning pages guaranteed that I got 0% of the benefits of morning pages—no mental declutter and no new ideas to work with during the day.

Doing anything, however imperfectly, had to be better than nothing, right? 25% better? 50%?

In fact, it would have been infinitely better! Because a 1% benefit is infinitely better than a 0% benefit.

Interestingly, I found that writing out my pages by typing them up on my computer not only let me do them on days when time was limited and with no physical pain, but I still got all the benefits that I received when writing them by hand.

I delayed doing a less-than-perfect version of something and missed out on all the benefits of that something rather than doing a “good enough” version of it and getting at least some of the benefits.

We’re all guilty of this.

We do it with our health: if we can’t do the extreme workout perfectly, we just don’t do anything at all. But going for a 15-minute walk is literally infinitely better than vegging out on the couch.

If we can’t stick to our meal plan perfectly (and no one ever can), we say “f–k it,” and eat an entire 18″ pizza. But eating 3 slices of pizza with a little salad is infinitely better than binge eating out of frustration.

We do it with our hobbies: if we can’t set aside two hours to practice our guitar, we let it languish on the stand in the corner. But spending 15 minutes learning a small section of a song is infinitely better than doing nothing.

This all-or-nothing mindset is all too common and the enemy of progress in everything we do. We’re trained in school to live by an A+ mindset: how far away am I from 100%?

But we’d be so much better off if we reversed it and asked, “how far away from 0% am I, and what decision would let me move a notch or two higher?”

I use this tactic all the time with my coaching clients when trying to make behavior changes stick, and it works wonders.

The next time you find yourself battling perfectionism, stop and take a breath. Then ask yourself, “What is 0% on this thing I’m trying to do?” Then figure out what a tiny notch higher on that scale is for you and do that.

Those little points, day after day, add up.