Perfection is Procrastination

So I’m reading the autobiography of Andre Agassi right now. It’s called open, and this is one of the best biographies I’ve ever. I’ve ever read. It’s so fascinating. It’s well written. Andre had a really incredible life. I want to share with you some ideas from this book that I’ve really been chewing on over the last couple of days. Now, what makes this book so fascinating to me is that Andre had just a really interesting life.

He was one of the greatest tennis players of all time in the early 2000s. He was like one of the two big players in the world. He won eight grand slams, just had a fantastic, marvelous career. Now, he was this prodigy from a very young age. He was very, very talented, and his dad recognized his ability. But his dad was a fanatic about tennis. His dad was kind of abusive and forced Andre to pursue this thing. He would make him practice for hours and hours and hours, every single day.

And it bred this relationship with Andre that Andre actually hated tennis. Deep down in his soul, he hated it. And he would tell everybody this, that he actually really hated the game of tennis. He felt like his life had been co opted from him and that he had been put on this path that his father dictated for him. And he had no choice ever since he was a child, but to walk this path. And it wasn’t a path that he wanted to walk, but it was the one that he was forced to. And he had some proclivities, some talents for it. Now, one of the struggles when you’re a prodigy is that everybody expects you to be perfect all the time because you have all this vast potential, this talent.

And his dad very much expected him to be perfect all the time. So his dad would be very abusive to him. If he ever missed a shot, put the ball into the net, or anything like that, would be very, very verbally abusive, and that can really wreak havoc on your psyche. And we see this with Andre’s career. In the early parts of his career, when he went pro at, like, 15, until about 22, he really struggled. He had the glimpses of greatness and the potential. But because he was constantly pursuing perfection with every stroke, every hit, every game, what happens is that when you don’t have perfection in any given moment, it’s very easy just to mentally unwind and lose yourself. And that’s what he would do.
You’d just turn into a basket case in the middle of a game and just kind of go from crushing to getting crushed. And this went on for many, many years. Until he met a gentleman by the name of Brad Gilbert. And Brad Gilbert wrote a book called winning Ugly, which is also another really fantastic book. What’s so interesting about Brad, though, is Brad is like the exact opposite of Andre. This dude, if you were to watch him play, you would think, this guy has no business being on the same tennis court as these professionals. He hits the ball slowly and poorly, and it just doesn’t make any sense how he’s able to stay in these games with these professionals who are smashing the ball so much harder than he is. Despite this, he was able to crawl his way to the top ten in the world, and he beat Andre on many occasions, and his theory was very, very interesting.
The way that he approached the game of tennis, I think, is a lesson that we can apply to our own lives, whether that’s in our creative endeavors or into our businesses. Andre ended up going to Brad and saying, will you coach me? Which is very interesting, because Andre at one point, is like the most talented guy in the world, and you look over at this other guy who clearly has zero talent, somehow he’s in the top ten. He plays a very wildly different looking game than Andre’s. And yet Andre went to him and was like, will you coach me? Teach me what you know and what am I not doing here? And they ended up working together, and it was like this turning point in Andre’s career where he went from being this inconsistent basket case to now winning back to back to back grand slams and being a very consistent, high level, quality player. And the tweak, the mental shift that they pursued, was, this is the problem, is that in trying to be perfect all the time, you set yourself up for, you’re not going to be perfect 98% of the time, right? And what happens in the 98% of times, then, when you don’t hit perfection, is that you fall apart. And Brad pointed out to Andre, he’s like, andre, you have no business losing to a guy like me, and yet I’ve beat you. Because on those days when we have played, you are trying to play at 100%, when in reality, you only needed to play at 80% to beat me. You didn’t need to be perfect to win.
You just needed to be better than me, and you are better than me. But instead of trying to just play better than me, you tried to play your best. And in pursuing your best, you actually fell apart. And so what they would do is instead of going into these matches and trying to play the absolute best match he could, the only goal was to win by whatever means, by the narrowest margins if necessary. The goal is just to be better than the guy across from you on that given day. If that requires you only to play at 80%, then you go and you play at 81%, right? Good enough is enough. You don’t need to be great every single day. You don’t need to be perfect every day.
If those days occur, great. Fantastic. You’re going to destroy the other guy, but all you really need to focus on is going into these matches and playing high percentage tennis that makes it so that the other guy beats himself because he’s just not up to your level. And I think about this a lot because I think a lot of times we use greatness or the idea of perfection as a tool of procrastination to hold us back from taking the actions or putting the work out there into the world and actually getting the genuine feedback that we would need to be able to make a quality assessment. It’s like, was this actually any good? We lie to ourselves and say, oh, I’m not ready yet. And it’s to be better, it needs to be better. It needs to be better. And in the process, we never actually do the thing that needs to be done.

That is to push publish, to push send, to actually make the pitch, to try and make the sale of the product, right? And I come back to this, I’ve written about this before, is that good enough is enough? That doesn’t mean you phone it in and you do crappy work. It just means you recognize what is the minimum viable product, the minimum viable standard that you need to hit with your product or whatever the thing is that you’re doing. What is that standard? Hit it and then send it. Move on to the next step instead of trying to pursue perfection, which is an idiot’s game because you’re never going to get there. Just focus on being good enough. And I think that is such a freeing mindset for a lot of us who tend to be perfectionists. And it will move you more meaningfully and quickly towards your goals because you are actually doing the things that will move you rather than spinning your wheels in the mud trying to do the impossible. So I highly recommend this book, open the story of Andre Agassi.

Also the book winning ugly by Brad Gilbert. Even if you’re not a tennis player, I think there’s some really fascinating strategies and ideas that we can apply to other areas of our life. So go give those a check and we’ll catch in the next episode.