This is a story about commitment, and how we allow the vision of perfection to steal what is possible, if we are only willing to be seen to be imperfect.

This week I am listening to an audiobook of Marie Forleo’s Everything is Figureoutable. Yes, that’s a made up word, but the concept is incredibly powerful. In short, she says that anything that is not against a law of nature can be figured out – humans can’t fly on their own, but we can invent airplanes and fly anyway. With enough ingenuity and persistence, as well as the support of others, we can get things done if we really want them. They may not turn out the way we had envisioned, but that’s not a reason not to try. 

Marie does not come from a background of money or higher education. While she acknowledges her privilege of having been born white in the United States, her book is full of amazing stories of people of every colour of the human spectrum, including a remarkable woman, Dr. Tererai Trent, who was sold as a child bride in Zimbabwe and is now a researcher and a philanthropist. Check her out at https://tererai.org/.

So why am I telling you this? Because listening to these stories made me realise that I was allowing my own perfectionism to prevent me from taking on a commitment that I really wanted to do.

As you may know, my mentor, Ray Higdon, began doing at least one video every single day on July 15, 2009. He has not missed a day since, and I don’t doubt that that level of commitment has been instrumental in taking him from his circumstance at that time, which was in personal foreclosure and a million dollars in debt after losing everything in the real estate crash of 2008, to his current status as a multi-millionaire, trainer and philanthropist.

Inspired by Ray, I started making videos a few years ago – you can find them on all my social media and my YouTube channel. I have received wonderful feedback on them and wanted to increase my commitment to doing them daily –  but I felt that I couldn’t, that it clashed with my religious commitment to turn off all my electronics on every major Jewish holiday. So I’ve been doing them several days a week, but never with the full commitment.

Listening to Marie, I realised that I’ve been holding myself back and limiting myself for no reason. I did some calculations and realised that of the 365 days in a normal year, there are actually 6 days on which I am completely offline for the entire 24 hours. Every other day, I am available at some point – either before the holiday starts, or after it ends.

I was preventing myself from committing to 359 days of videos, because I couldn’t do the other 6. How limiting is that? What else might I be preventing myself from committing to, on equally flimsy grounds?

You don’t have to watch all 359 of the videos I’ll be doing in the coming year, although of course I would be delighted if you did. But I’d love to hear what YOU are planning to rethink in the same manner – is there something you’ve been telling yourself you can’t do, because you can’t do it perfectly? Are you going to change that? I’d love to know!