You Don’t Need to be Perfect to Get Perfectly Good Results

Recently I was teaching a time management seminar for a software company. At a break, I spoke with a group of people from the program. One of them, a woman in her 20s, said to me, “You are so good at this stuff. I’ll bet you’re like a robot.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You just get this stuff automatically, don’t you? I’ll bet you do every one of the things you’re teaching us today, perfectly.”

I laughed. I know how much that’s not the case. I know all the areas I struggle to improve. I know also how long I had to work to build up all the little habits that allow me to do the things I was teaching her consistently. I told her this.

I’m not sure she believed me.


We don’t need to do everything perfectly to have perfectly great lives

I am far from perfect. I don’t think we need to do things perfectly to get great results, at least in most areas of life. I drink a lot of coffee. I average about 4-5 cups a day. Sometimes my hands shake as a result. An interesting question, though: Do I drink too much coffee? This question leads me to the topic for this next post: not doing things perfectly is OK.

We just can’t do everything perfectly. There simply isn’t the time and resources to do so. There isn’t really a need to do so. Also, trying to do one thing optimized may interfere with optimizing another area of our life.

Speaking of coffee drinking, one thing I’ve decided not to do perfectly is diet and exercise. I want to do well in this area, and do that consistently. But I’ve decided after many trials to stop trying to do it perfectly. This is an area I’ve struggled my whole life, feeling the burden of all the “shoulds.” I should eat so many leafy greens a day, should eat more fruit, and should eat less refined sugar.


Diet and exercise can feel like an area that needs to be perfect

This area, diet and exercise, has been studied and written about so extensively, is reported about in the news and media so often, I think it’s easy for us all to feel inundated by the shoulds. Unfortunately, no amount of shoulds got me where I wanted to be. In fact, the more I told myself I should the less I seemed to want to persevere in creating an eating plan I could live with.

That’s the critical thing, as I mentioned in my last post on the 5% idea. We have to focus on building a system of habits we can live with. Otherwise any change we make is just a temporary set of behaviors getting pushed through by our willpower alone, and will likely depart as soon as our focus shifts or our willpower gives.

I experienced this cycle (willpower alone and then the behavior leaves) many times around diet and exercise. I decided to do something to end it, something I based on the 80/20 rule. You’ve probably heard of this rule: it postulates that in many performance areas, 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. In other words, everything we do or strive to do, in my case around diet, is not worth the same amount. If you can’t do it all (which we usually can’t), choose the things that will give you the best return. That way you can invest less and reap more.


Eat, Drink and Be Healthy helped me take a different approach

So I did: I focused on choosing my 20% behaviors. I started by looking for new information I this area of diet and exercise, something that would enable me rather than bury me in shoulds. Getting new information can be a great way to get unstuck from a habit that’s not working for you. I finally stumbled upon the new information, the new perspective. It came to me in a program I taught a few years ago where I mentioned some things about diet and exercise during the course of my talk. A program participant spoke with me afterward and recommended I check out a book. The book is called Eat, Drink and be Healthy by Walter Willett, MD. What a wonderful book. I highly recommend it.

The author, the Dean of Nutrition at Harvard Medical school, takes an intriguing approach to health. First, he ranks all health behaviors in order of importance. In his food pyramid, the most important rules to follow are at the foundation of the pyramid. (This was perfect for me, as I wanted to know the 20% to focus on.)

Also, he bases every conclusion on the existing data and results of many tests. It’s interesting to note there’s not a lot of conclusive information in the area of diet and exercise. You’ve probably experienced this watching the news. One day, a study comes to one conclusion, and a few months later another study reverses it. He speaks about how not all published conclusions are founded. Turns out it takes a while to test most aspects of diet, many years often, and most of these studies haven’t yet put in the time.

My favorite part of the book, and why I thought you might find it useful, is that he breaks his recommendations into three categories:

• here’s what we know for sure is good/bad for you (based on extensive tests)
• here’s what we are almost sure of (still need some more tests to be sure)
• here’s what I believe but we don’t have the data to be sure yet

I love his approach. I get overwhelmed sometimes when reading about all the things I should do in order to have a good diet and be healthy. I love how he’s broken out the to-dos, making it easier to choose the most important ones for your goals.

So, based on his recommendations, I decided to follow the 80/20 rule and just focus on the most important things. The things I’ve chosen to focus on are first, exercising regularly (even more important to life length and quality of life than diet, based on the research). Second, I’m working to moderate my intake of saturated fats.

I may choose never to get to the rest of the recommendations. If I do go further, though, the next thing on my list would be to eat more whole grains. Even though I’ve chosen, at least for now, to try doing well on diet and exercise, and not going after perfection, it feels great to know I’m doing a good job on the two most important things.

Should I stop drinking coffee, or is it not a bad thing?

So back to drinking coffee. I may drink too much, but maybe not. According to Willet, coffee is pretty much an OK thing to drink, according to the data. He suggests not going over four cups a day, but he points out that much of the past research into the negative effects of coffee had a research problem: it didn’t separate coffee drinking from smoking, a related habit at the time. As a result, many of the negatives we may associate with coffee today are more a product of smoking than coffee.

Willet says a moderate amount of coffee is likely a neutral behavior: the benefits match the risks. Drinking coffee may cause kidney stones and a few other problems, but according to the data, it helps as well. Did you know that if you’re a regular coffee drinker, you are 50% less likely to commit suicide?

I’ll continue to drink my coffee. His conclusions about coffee are good news for me. Even if the data pointed to coffee being an overall negative, I might still drink as much as I do. I get psychological benefits. I enjoy drinking it. I enjoy making it, the daily ritual of grinding the beans. I enjoy the smell of it. I love the pick-me-up.

So where do you need to apply the 80/20 rule? Are there areas in your life that are full of shoulds? Might you benefit from choosing a few good behaviors, doing them consistently, and letting the rest go—at least for now? Think about it. Let me know what you decide.