ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN NOTHING

While it may be true, as the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son, that “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well,” it must be at least as true that whatever is worth doing at all, is better done poorly than not at all – this has become a sort of mantra for me (anything worth doing is better done poorly than not at all – or if you prefer the shortened version: anything is better than nothing) – I say it to myself constantly throughout the day – I suffer from a tendency toward perfection – not the useful form of perfectionism that allows some great people to achieve higher and higher levels of excellence – far from it, my particular brand of perfectionism causes me to tend to get lost in the most useless analysis of minutia making it almost impossible to complete anything – it’s the sort of perfectionism that once a flaw is discovered, it takes every bit of will that I can muster to avoid scrapping the whole thing – it’s the kind of perfectionism that causes me to freeze at the beginning of an endeavor for fear of making a mistake and ruining the whole thing – over the years, I’ve come up with a number of strategies to combat this stupid tendency, but the best one of all has been to intentionally accepting poor performance at the outset – to say to myself and anyone else who is willing to listen that it’s going to suck, but we have to start somewhere – next time we’ll try to make it suck a little bit less – when you add to all this my tendency to procrastinate and couple that with the fact that I’ve been busier this month than I can ever remember being at any other time in my life, what you end up with is this present post that’s going to suck (next time I’ll try to make it suck a little bit less)

When I began thinking about writing a blog in December, I made it a goal to write 12 posts (one for each month) on or before the 1st of each month – I even allotted ten minute time slots on Saturdays and Sundays, so that I’d have a whole eighty minutes in which to write each post – once again, this month I didn’t use the allotted time and so here I am, once again, on the last day of the month, with nothing written and even less to say – when this sort of thing happens, I rely on the maxim, “anything is better than nothing,” because it is a fact (at least in the areas of discipline) – I use it when I’m planning my classes – I use it when I’m trying to exercise – I use it when I’m organizing, cleaning, and sorting – in short, any time I have something to do that I’ve endeavored to do that I haven’t done and I don’t feel like doing, I rely on the mantra and the mantra gets me through.