Ideal state fallacy
The ideal time to take an action never arrives. The utopian state is unachievable. We are never fully prepared. But that’s okay.
We usually start with chaos, and as we go further, we bring order to it, but the perfect order stays unachievable.
Two types of ideal state expectation traps:
The Preconditions - The ideal state to take action:
The ideal state for starting something new rarely exists.
Let's start by recalling an event that happened a few days back:
There is a vegetable called bitter gourd which grows on vines. It has different varieties, one of them is very small in size—a bit larger than berries. We had a few vines of those small ones scattered in our fields. One day my uncle was picking those and asked me why I never picked those from the vines. He wondered if I didn’t like them. I told him I like them, but I don’t pick them because I feel I won’t find enough for one meal. Perhaps I’ll pick them in a few days when more of them grow.
He said, “Once you start picking, you’ll keep finding more, and soon there will be enough. You just need to start. It might take longer than you imagine, but you will eventually have enough.”
I realized how often we do that—looking for a perfect time to start something.
The ideal state to start learning a new skill is unachievable. The perfect state to start writing or reading will never arrive. The conditions to start a business will never be perfect. The preconditions are often just excuses we make to delay taking action.
Why do we do that? Because we fail to acknowledge that we have a finite amount of time here on earth and think that we can do everything we want. But that's just a way of closing our eyes to reality. There will always be things for which we won’t have enough time. But that's just how it is. We have to prioritize and take action.
The Perfectionism - The ideal state to finish and deliver something:
Perfectionism is a lack of courage and fear of judgment in disguise.
We often believe that we should deliver a product only when it reaches perfection, but the fact is, no product will ever attain perfection. The reason why we chase this perfection is that we are scared of the unknown, uncertainty, and most importantly, others judging us. That is why a work-in-progress phase gives us the pleasure of working on something important while also saving us from the humiliation (imaginary as it may be) of delivering an imperfect product.
The efficiency of an internal combustion engine is approximately 30%. Imagine if the people who were building the first IC engine had insisted on waiting until they achieved 100% efficiency before installing the engines in cars. Guess what? We wouldn’t have had cars until now, and we wouldn’t have them in the near future either.
Air resistance is not negligible; we cannot ignore real-life friction, whether in physics problems or in life.
Thermodynamically, achieving absolute zero is impossible; it’s simply a fundamental aspect of reality.
Solution:
Time:
If it is a new thing for which you feel you don’t have enough time, start taking small actions. Squeeze the new activity in regardless, and it will make time for itself. As Parkinson’s law states, “Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.”
There might be activities in our day that don’t need as much time, and if given less time, they will still finish with optimum results. Accept that this life is what we have, and it is finite—you will be gone soon. Why don’t we play the most magnificent game while we are here? Do what’s meaningful?
Courage:
Just do it. Publish the article you’ve been holding on to. Start the business you’ve been wanting to. Accept that you won’t be perfect in the first iteration. A lot of the time, if you increase the quantity, your quality also improves.
For example, making one perfect video on YouTube is hard, but making a lot of good videos helps you improve and make the perfect one eventually. The same goes for any other activity. Don’t let the pursuit of perfection paralyze your progress; take action, learn from your experiences, and keep moving forward.
Let’s just agree that the first few iterations of anything will suck. I have been delaying blogging for years, and still, my first blog is not near perfect. But now I have taken the step of delivering a bit less than a perfect blog, learning from the mistakes, and improving.