50 Little Ways to Make Your Life So Much Easier

23. Do Your Worst Before You Do Your Best

“For many people, fear of imperfection is paralyzing,” notes Erin K. Tierno, a psychotherapist. “All too often, people interrupt their capacity for productivity by imagining all the ways their work product will fail to meet whatever standards they have imagined are the bar by which they will be measured.” One trick to getting those wheels moving again is to imagine producing the worst version of whatever you need to produce, and working through the implications of that. It might sound weird, but this liberates people from their fear of judgement and practice continuing on in the face of fear. “More often than not, people recognize through this exercise that they will actually be okay even if the worst really does happen and, more likely, what they’ll produce won’t even come close to their imagined worst outcome.”