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- ⏳ Erebus Growing | 0041 - Tenet 5: Practice progress, not perfection
⏳ Erebus Growing | 0041 - Tenet 5: Practice progress, not perfection
Progress is the best way, and only way, to grow
Welcome to Erebus Growing, a weekly email where I share little snippets of life to help you change and grow into your highest life.
It’s a time of change in my life. I’m looking into a new 9-5 job, still working at my current 9-5 and part-time, and considering what I want my life to look like.
And it’s okay.
I’m genuinely excited about it.
It’s time for change and that’s good with me.
I am not the same person I was.
But anyway, we’ll see how that unfolds.
It’s a somewhat busy week and I’m excited about a number of things at both the 9-5 and part-time as well as some projects I’m working on in my personal time.
👨🏻💻 Meditation
Perhaps one of my favorite lessons from the past couple of years has been to practice progress, not perfection.
I am, without a doubt, someone who could spend hours trying to make something look perfect.
One of the things that really annoys me is when documents are not properly formatted.
And don’t lie, you know exactly what i mean.
You see the little changes here and there too.
It annoys you too on some level.
I am happy to sit and reformat document after document to make them uniform, consistent, and presentable (in my mind).
That constantly caused me to work longer to get projects done for the 9-5.
I took on more work at the 9-5 in late 2020 and had to adjust my personal expectations. No longer could I just tweak things.
I now had to get them done.
Alongside that was this idea of simply iterating on projects.
Just finish the first version—get something down on the page—and then improve on it.
The very essence of “ready, fire, aim” that I learned from Rob Dial.
Too many people, myself included, get stuck in planning.
We plan and plan and plan until we have plans about planning.
But we never actually do.
Sometimes, the best thing we can do is give it a mediocre effort.
One pushup is better than none.
Time spent meditating is better than no time spent meditating.
We just do it, then we can improve.
We start to accumulate data points that allow us to adjust—whether its the time, the task, the length, the mindset, whatever.
We start to do with the intent to improve and not just finish.
It’s this doing with the intent to improve that makes the difference. This is what allows us to grow.
When I pushed for my indoor rowing challenge in 2022, I started to row when I had time. This meant after I got home from work.
That became troublesome. While I did row, I found reasons not to.
I was too tired.
I had a long day.
I had unfinished work.
I went out to dinner with a friend.
I found any excuse was permissible if I really didn’t want to row that night.
To that end, I addressed it. I moved my rowing time to the morning before any type of external commitment could interfere.
And I then adjusted that routine because I wasn’t posting online the way I wanted to. I would create content after I rowed, but that meant it may or may not happen.
I swapped content creation and rowing around. I was now creating content before I started rowing.
I knew exactly how long it would take me to row the 10,000 meters I was doing daily: 50 minutes, give or take five minutes.
That meant that I had a firm time that I had to start rowing by to finish before I needed to get ready to work.
Instead of trying to build this perfect routine and then giving up when it didn’t work out, I adjusted.
I started shifting things around until I found something that worked the way I wanted it to work.
I knew that I wanted to better honor my body but it would need to be incremental.
Doing anything all at once typically is not the best way, so take a moment, breathe in and out, and practice progress, not perfection.
📚 Inspiration and Resources
Every week we all consume content and I share my favorites here.
Watch.
I found a super interesting video on YouTube this morning that I wanted to share. Peter Whidden taught an AI how to play Pokemon Red. It was a great watch and had a couple of insights that really struck me. One of the insights not explicitly mentioned was that when we hit a pattern that allows things to work out to our benefit, we’ll tend to work towards that pattern over and over. It’s how we can create our own luck, in a way. Give it a watch here.
Read.
A number of months ago, I read an article from Tiago Forte on completing a Weekly Review. This is something that I’ve been trying to build into my work life and, eventually, into my personal life. I highly recommend reading through the article if you have any interest at all in building a life where you systemize the routine things you need to do so that you can live the rest of your life spontaneously. Give it a read here.
📓 Journaling Prompt
Journaling is one of the most important things to do when exploring our own lives. A new prompt for you to use this week is below.
Where can you stop being perfect and focus on simply improving?