Perfectionism is the enemy of productive people everywhere. At first glance, you might think, oh, productive people, they want everything to be perfectly working hard. They're working till midnight. They're working, working to make it perfect. No. perfectionism is often nothing but an excuse to never ship to never finish.

To never put your wares out to the world. You don't want to keep tinkering. It's really a procrastinating. And quite often, it's about fear, fear of other people judging your work. So you tell yourself Well, it's not perfect yet. Let me just work on a little bit longer.

Next thing you know, six years have gone by. And the thing you were trying to do is now irrelevant, because the world and technology has gone on to other things that make it just completely a non issue. highly productive people have high standards. They want to do their best at all times, but they know it's not about being Perfect because nothing is perfect. Nothing dealing with human beings is ever perfect. A huge, huge concept.

You see this in the high tech world, but it's relevant everywhere, minimum viable product. So many great software developers, high tech companies launch what they call a minimum viable product, they put it out there, they get a response. They see what people like sometimes you kill it off, it just wasn't good enough. But other times, customers like some element of it, criticize others, and you make the next version a little better, and then a little better, and then a little better. That's what I've done, frankly, is my online courses. Now I'm fortunate enough and happy to be able to tell you, I have best selling courses on the number one platform and a few others four categories of public speaking, communication skills, media training, storytelling, assertiveness, so skills I have best selling courses in those topics.

And in many ways, it's the number one best seller. That sounds great. But the only reason I have those is I put out some minimum viable products of other courses. I have courses on how to give a retirement speech courses on how to give wedding speeches. And you know what those courses did, they failed miserably. I got almost no paying students in those courses.

But I didn't work on them for years and years and years and spent 10s of thousands of dollars on production for most of those courses. I did them in less than a day spent no hard dollar investment. So I could risk it, get feedback to figure out how do I make the next one better. There was a lot of trial and error. I wish I had done it faster. But I'm happy that I tried ultimately, it worked out a lot of bestsellers.

That's why it's so important to embrace this concept of minimum viable product. It is the complete opposite of the perfectionist mantra, which is keep changing, keep tinkering, keep fiddling with it. And ultimately, you never come up with anything you don't produce. I also see this in the world of presentation where people think of themselves as perfectionist as a good thing. And they want to tinker with their PowerPoint deck for weeks, sometimes months, and they want to do it at midnight the night before the presentation. And they want to do it at 8am in the morning of their presentation when the presentation is at 830.

Oops. One thing they forgot, because they're spending so much time tweaking the text in the image and the color and the font. They never actually rehearsed their presentation, plus, making The presentation guaranteed to be an awful failure. That's the big problem with perfectionist they also typically sabotage their efforts so they don't actually make it perfect. They either keep it from ever coming out or they actually destroy it in the process. If you think you have a problem with perfectionism, you need to cure it right away because it's the curse of productivity.