Don't let perfection get in your way.
If you’ve been thinking about joining the FIRE movement, the time to take action is now. No matter what you’ve told yourself, you don’t need the perfect plan to get started.
When it comes to financial independence, we often focus on improvement. How can I save more? Get the best returns? Pay the lowest fees?
And while this attention to detail can shave years off of our retirement date, focusing on perfection too soon could prevent us from starting at all.
As an avid planner, this is something I’ve experienced firsthand.
I am forever planning, evaluating, and replanning our journey to financial independence— searching for the best way to maximize our happiness now while building a life of freedom for later.
But recently, I noticed that despite all of this planning, we’d made little (if any) improvements over the past couple of months. And this realization came from an unexpected place.
Recently, I was listening to a podcast about writing, and more specifically writer’s block. The focus, of course, was on overcoming it. And the solution, it turns out, is surprisingly simple — just start writing.
That’s it. Stop planning, stop editing, stop revising and just write.
The idea is not to give up on improvement. But when we start trying to perfect something we haven’t yet created, we get lost. We start feeling overwhelmed and pretty soon, we have nothing left to write.
I have found this to be true with my writing. And once I started to think about it, I realized it held true with my money as well.
While planning is a necessary — even vital — stage of any project, an obsession with planning can quickly halt all progress. By shifting the focus away from perfection, progress becomes inevitable.
So next time you’re feeling stuck, ask yourself, “What can I do right now to get closer to my goal?”
The idea isn’t to stop trying to improve — that just needs to come later. Just like you can’t edit words that aren’t yet on paper, you can’t perfect a system that isn’t yet in place.
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