This book really found me where I live. There are a lot of books about goals and goal-setting, but this is the first one that really nailed why I wasn’t meeting my goals.
In Finish, Jon Acuff discusses the most important day of the goal. Not day one. We’ve all gotten off to a great start. I’ve had so many fantastic day ones.
No, the dangerous day is The Day After Perfect. I’ve never heard anyone talk about the day after perfect before, but I’ve been there many times. We were going to go to the gym every day but we missed yesterday, so what do we do now? We were going to write over 1000 words each day of NaNoWriMo but we were too busy yesterday and now we’re already behind and I guess we failed again. We were going to get this project done in a week but now it’s day eight and we didn’t meet our goal so I guess we failed and there’s no reason to keep working on it, right? Wrong.
The day after perfect isn’t the only place this book made me feel seen. It also called me out for my Hiding Places and Noble Obstacles.
What’s a hiding place?
A hiding place is the safe place you go to hide from your fear of messing up. It’s the task that lets you get your perfectionism fix by making you feel successful even as you avoid your goal.
Yep, I’ve got those. What’s a noble obstacle?
A noble obstacle is what perfectionism throws at you next if you deal with the hiding places. It’s the Very Good Reason you cannot pursue your goal.
Yep, I’ve got those too. They usually look like the pile of homework I give myself, like I have to read every cookbook about a cuisine or diet before I make the first week’s menu. I want to write a book about a topic but first I have to read every book in existence that’s already been written about the topic. I’ll get to my goal, I just have to get through this list of preliminary tasks first.
At the heart of it, a noble obstacle is an attempt to make your goal harder than it has to be so you don’t have to finish, but can still look respectable.
Hmm. I feel called out.
Acuff also helps you figure out your Secret Rules and rewrite them. He has tools and tricks for getting past every way you hold yourself back. He warns you, not only about the Day After Perfect, but about it’s evil twin as you approach completion of your goal: The Day Before Done.
You fought through the day after perfect. You cut your goal in half. You killed your cuckoos. You made sure your goal is fun. You are inches away from finished and perfectionism knows it. It only has one last chance to wreck the whole thing, one last opportunity to topple the entire goal.
There are so many helpful parts of this book, tips I want to remember, strategies I want to use. But the most important sentence in the book, for me, was this:
Chronic starters can become consistent finishers. We can finish.
We can finish. Sometimes if we’ve started a lot of things we stop believing in our ability to finish. But we can learn to finish and we can become consistent finishers.