Salvador Dali said, “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”

Yet, many people are paralyzed by perfection. After all, perfectionism sounds great: who doesn’t want to be perfect? However, aiming for perfection is a great way to become and unsatisfied and disappointed. Why? Simply because, as Salvador Dali references, perfection isn’t attainable. Aiming for perfection causes many people to quit when they could have made incremental progress toward a goal.

If you frame your goals in terms of perfection, you are likely to experience feelings of failure frequently. Your failures are brilliant opportunities to learn. The issue comes when you have a toxic relationship with failure. Telling yourself “I’m going to fail at this,” or “this cannot possibly work” are ways to make sure that you do indeed quit or that you definitely don’t succeed.

By choosing a goal for yourself that is a step past where you are now, you can find yourself far more satisfied, and more importantly, actually making progress toward the goal.