Practice Makes Progress

“Practice makes progress”

As a lifelong perfectionist (and as someone living with OCD – yes that was diagnosed by a psychologist, not TikTok) this phrase hit me hard when my excellent career coach Martha Schmidt shared this with me earlier today.

Many of you are probably well familiar with this advice by now. For me, it wasn’t just new, it was revelatory. It was relief. And it was regret.

After dozens of late nights (and a few all-nights), I proved the hard way that I can’t create the *perfect sales proposal*. But each one I made was a little bit better than the last. I wish I’d taken time to reflect on that when I was in enterprise sales.

After a mile-long trail of Slack messages (some sent, some never sent) to colleagues, I’m still not the perfect co-worker or the perfect manager. I wish I had dropped that quest and just tried to be there for people in smaller ways that were more meaningful to them anyway. David Doan, apologies for all the times I told you I’d “get right back to you” – I meant to say “…in a few days” but I got distracted and forgot to finish typing.

The funny part is, we don’t expect our colleagues to be perfect. We don’t expect our kids or parents to be perfect. So by chasing perfection instead of progress, we’re not even responding to people’s needs. We’re caught in a trap of endless self-expectations, and in the process, we’re losing sight of the joy of progress for the sake of something unattainable.

Better yet, “practice makes progress” doesn’t reward giving up, settling for less, or declaring that we’re not succeeding because the system is rigged.

Until I repeat it so much that it becomes as familiar to me as it may be to you, “practice makes progress” will remind me that:

• Effort can be fulfilling without being exhausting.
  
• The object of the game we’re playing is to win the day in a life, not life in a day.

This post was originally shared on LinkedIn.