Reflect: Doubt is Normal. Accept It.

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If your mind is filled with thoughts of wanting to quit, it doesn’t mean you are weak. It means you are normal.

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Even the best in the world feel a strong urge to quit sometimes.

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What matters is taking those doubts and urges along for the ride: instead of freaking out and reacting to them, you accept them and get on with the show.

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We all have insecurities. They never fully go away. You just don't want to let them limit your potential.

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Think: This is normal. I'm a human. There is no such thing as being invincible. But I've put in the work. Let's find out what happens next.

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The Imperfect Path to Greatness

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An ever-increasing trend in the world of optimization is striving to be perfect.

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You see it often in advice given online: Never drink coffee. Always do an exacting workout. Get that 100% sleep score. Don’t have the Fritos or Oreos because you need to eat clean.
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Perfectionism is worn as a badge of honor, a show of one's dedication to the pursuit of health or performance. But if you peel back the layers, a blinding obsession with being perfect doesn’t help health or performance. It almost certainly gets in the way.

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Perfectionism is a mask. It’s a way to deal with a lack of control. The person who is afraid of their mortality becomes obsessed with all of the longevity trappings to an extreme degree. The person who ties their entire identity to being an athlete transforms into a neurotic mess who will do nothing that could possibly hurt their performance. The anxiety drives the compulsion. It’s a way to cope with the uncertainty and fragility that accompanies striving for something that means a lot to you—and potentially falling short.

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These fears are common. I may not be good enough, or I have limitations, or I am mortal, or I could fail are all frightening confrontations. Convincing ourselves that we can be perfect and therefore eliminate uncertainty gives us some comfort that we can control the outcomes, even when that is almost always an illusion.

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You see this most clearly in extremes: eating disorders, OCD, and clinical anxiety. The control temporarily eases one's symptoms, only to make things worse in the long run. But these patterns are not exclusive to the extremes: they affect nearly everyone in day-to-day life, and have big implications for performance.
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The best athletes, entrepreneurs, and artists we’ve been around all have some degree of obsession. But they don’t let that tip into neurotic perfectionism and over-controlling. They have an occasional drink with friends (unless they are in recovery), sometimes stay out late, or indulge in dessert instead of eating hyper clean. They understand that it’s the totality of the work and lifestyle that matters, not any one thing. A big part of what allows the greats to stay dedicated over the long haul is the brief moments where they let their guard down and release the pressure just enough.

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Trying to be perfect is a surefire path to burning bright for a day, week, or maybe even a few months. But eventually, you burn out. It’s like the Simple Plan song: I’m sorry I can’t be perfect.

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What elite performers actually do is productively direct their obsession, with just enough perspective to realize what matters and what doesn’t. Those trapped in the myth of perfectionism convince themselves that never getting a bad night's sleep or never eating Chik-Fil-A is what makes them great. Meanwhile, the best athletes know they need to show up even after a bad night's sleep, like JJ Spaun did when he won the U.S. Open after caring for his sick daughter at 3 AM. Usain Bolt ate 1,000 McDonald’s chicken nuggets at the Olympics before performing at a level that had never been seen in history. Part of what makes great performers great is an ability to focus deeply on what makes the most difference, while simultaneously letting go of what's not make-or-break. We're not saying wake up at 3 AM or binge on McDonald's! But we are saying you don't have to be perfect.

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Don’t major in the minors. Keep the main things the main things.

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If you keep telling your brain that every single little thing is life or death, that a cookie could ruin your diet and disrupt your health, then your brain receives a very clear message. It learns to be on high alert, predicting disaster if the slightest deviation from your plan occurs. It’s the athlete who lost the game before it even started because they couldn’t sleep well the night before. Or the longevity influencer who can’t stop ruminating over the chocolate they had at dinner—it’s not the piece of chocolate that’s making them feel sick, it’s their obsessive perfectionism and anxiety! They’ve trained themselves to think that one slip-up is the end of the world, and their brain complies.

Walking around saying you never consume sugar, always sleep 9 hours a night, etc., seems like dedication. It makes you feel good—you tell yourself you are so dedicated that you are leaving no stone unturned.

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Many equate themselves to the cycling team that popularized “marginal gains,” obsessing over the team’s pillows and mattresses to optimize sleep, measuring the distance the riders walked to their bikes, and optimizing every single small detail. It’s a good story. But more often than not, it leaves you fragile and insecure. There’s a reason the team that popularized marginal gains was, in reality, part of a doping scandal. It wasn’t the marginal gains that made the difference. It was the maximal ones. They kept the main things the main things—only in their case, the main things were cheating with drugs that worked!

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It's no different than the influencers online telling you that the key to their performance is such-and-such special tea, supplement, or sleep protocol when in reality they are doping, plagiarizing, air-brushing their images, staging their lives, lying about their profit margin, and on and on and on. It’s a grift that is as old as time.

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Make no mistake: if you want to be your best, you need habits and systems. You need to control the controllables. But you also need to let go of the uncontrollables, to not cling so tightly to every little thing that your entire sense of stability crumbles under the weight of your own perfection.

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A much better aspiration is to be like the elite performers we know who play the long game. Those who are actually excellent. (And who don't cheat!) They live a healthy and sustainable lifestyle. They aren’t thrown off by whatever wrench life throws their way, because they’ve learned they can still show up and do the work, even in imperfect conditions, be it a baby waking them up in the middle of the night, limited food options in a foreign country, or just the need to chill out for a while.

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Perfectionism trains our brains to freak out. Real performance is about training our brains to be flexible enough. Because inevitably life will get in the way. When it does, we can either spiral or we can realize that we’re okay and find a way through. Every day, we get a choice as to what route we'll practice.

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Be good. Control what you can. But don't fall for the trap of thinking that perfectionism is making you strong when, in fact, it's making you fragile.

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-- Steve and Brad

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Listen: Time-Tested Tools for Navigating Discomfort

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A helpful metaphor for navigating discomfort—whether it’s physical or psychological, during a workout or at work—is to imagine those difficult feelings or thoughts as an alarm.

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Alarms contain important information, but it’s up to us to determine what to do with that information. Sometimes, the alarm really indicates an emergency, and we need to stop what we’re doing. But oftentimes, it’s a false alarm. We don’t need to stop what we’re doing; we just need to figure out how to turn it off, turn it down, or continue working while it blasts in the background.

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Today’s episode of “excellence, actually” (Apple/Spotify) is all about giving you the tools to figure out which strategy you need to employ when difficulty arises, and how to put those strategies into practice.

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We walk through practical advice for figuring out whether the difficulty requires acceptance or problem-solving and then build out a robust set of skills you can use to navigate both: how to shift your focus by zooming in and out; the self-talk trick you can use to give yourself some psychological distance; a more effective way to label your emotions so that you can better navigate them; and the surprisingly effective acceptance mantra when every other tool fails and you just have to get to work with the alarm blaring.

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-- Clay

Thank you for reading this week's edition of The Growth Equation newsletter. We hope you found it valuable.

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