Imperfection and Mini-Habits

Hey Guys! Hope all of you are safe and well. I have been posting on Sundays and many readers asked me to post on Saturday so that they will have a Sunday to read the post. That is what I am going to do from this post. Upcoming posts will release on Saturdays.

In this post, I am going to explain two of my favourite ideas from the book, “How to be an Imperfectionist” by Stephen Guise. These 2 ideas are mini habits and perfectionism. Firstly I will explain what is the difference between perfection and perfectionism. Perfection means flawless, which is good. But perfectionism means regarding anything short of perfection as unacceptable. Perfection is a top state. Perfectionism is a flawed concept. Many people take perfectionism as a compliment, which it isn’t. It results in not taking risks/chances, it stresses you out, it doesn’t allow the rawness inside of you to come out. Also, perfectionism is one biggest cause of procrastination.

Now coming to the idea of mini habits. Mini habits are activities that you can’t possibly fail to do, and do it until it becomes a habit and grows into something bigger. An example of this is writing one line of code, reading two pages of a book every day. These mini habits are small at first but grow to become something bigger. Mini habits are very strong mainly because they are so small that there is no scope for error in them. I personally used the idea of mini habits once. I used to hate reading books in the non-fiction genre. So I developed a mini habit to read at least 5 pages of a non-fiction book in a week. Slowly it became 5 pages per day and now I have come to a point where I can read a whole non-fiction book in one day without getting bored. You can read about many more possible mini habits ideas here.

Mini habits are something that can help you tackle perfectionism which further tackles procrastination. As we know procrastination happens due to perfection. Which means that we need to become imperfectionists so that we will gain the freedom required to do tasks that are good, not perfect. This isn’t bad or something to frown upon. Imperfection is needed, especially in today’s times when most of the people around you are imperfectionists.

Mini habits result in imperfectionism a lot of times. The author had experienced this many times. Once he went to a grocery store to get some vegetables. His gym was beside the grocery store. He had developed a mini habit to do a little exercise each day. But that day he wasn’t in his gym clothes and also his fingers had been hurt, which meant that normally he would have used these as reasons and not gone to the gym. But because he had developed a mini habit to go to the gym, he still went to the gym and did an imperfect set of lunges, tricep dips and open-handed chest flys. Here, the perfectionist in him saw two strong reasons not to go to the gym but the imperfectionist saw an opportunity for a little bit of forwarding progress.

Mini habits are tools of an imperfectionist but too small for a perfectionist to even consider. All of us know that we are perfectionists. If you tend to tear a page out of your book if it is too untidy or if you put off reading a book saying that you aren’t active at that time, if you put off doing tasks to the tomorrow that never comes, just know that you have a bit of perfectionism inside of you.

These were the ideas of imperfection and mini-habits. These ideas are small solutions to tackle procrastination. If you want to read about more of these solutions, you should read the book. You can get it on Amazon here. Hope you guys like it! I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section and please subscribe to Bookgest for more such posts. Be sure to implement these ideas in your life as I am sure that they will make a lasting change. With that said, see you next Saturday! Peace.