I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
One of my favorite ideas from Stephen Guise’s book How to Be an Imperfectionist is using a binary rather than analog mindset in assessing your completion status or other achievement on something you want to do. The binary mindset asks in yes-no fashion. The analog mindset grades accomplishment along some continuum of better and worse.
For example, I’m writing a book. To decide whether I’m done, an analog mindset would ask something like “is this good enough to publish?” To decide whether the book, once published, is a success, that mindset would ask something like, “Did I sell 1,000 copies?” or “Did I get a good review in the New York Times?” or something else requiring an evaluation along a scale.
The binary mindset would judge completion and success by asking “Did I finish and publish the book?”
Of the binary mindset, Guise writes:
Procrastination is not caused by laziness but by a combination of fear and overcomplicated objectives, which come from a perfectionistic mindset.
The binary mindset is at the heart of imperfectionism and is a powerful way to dissolve your concern over mistakes. It’s structured in such a way that mistakes won’t feel like mistakes. It is empowering because it competes with “excuse” activities like watching TV; it takes away excuses while simplifying actions to encourage you forward….
Binary focuses on facts–did it happen or not? The analog, subjective component focuses on quality, impact, reception, mistakes, and overall, how close to perfect it was. Always choose binary, and through learning and practice you’ll get the desired results without worrying about them.
I’m thinking about this in the context of my philosophy of recklessness. The Old English verb to reck meant to care or take heed of and relates to the modern word reckon, which suggests making an accounting of something. I noticed that I was constantly calculating and accounting around things in my life. I was always evaluating whether I was good enough and whether what I did was good enough. This is the analog mindset at work.
The binary mindset is reckless. It doesn’t reckon around with what’s good enough. It looks at what is.
In my relationship with my boyfriend I could ask myself: Is this relationship good enough for me? Is he good enough for me? Can I do better? That is the analog mindset at work. It brings a measuring scale to questions of compatibility and it also implicitly puts my qualities up against his, turned into some pseudo-quantified assessment.
Or I can ask yes-no questions. Do I like hanging out with him? Yes, very much. Is my life better with him than without? Absolutely. Is he crazy attractive to me? Indeed he is.
This is another way of getting at the question of settling in a relationship. I wrote in that earlier blog post that “Settling assumes a measuring stick.” Reckful approaches to life bring a measuring stick to everything: to daily tasks, to creations you put in the world, to relationships.
An analog mindset can be made binary, and this is another way to escape perfectionism. I’ve done that with my three-out-of-ten rule, which starts with reckfulness — a measuring stick, an evaluation scale — and turns it into recklessness — a yes/no decision on something.
My three-out-of-ten rule asks of anything aspect of life: how does it rate on a ten-point scale? Or, more accurately, “Is this better than a three out of ten?” Instead of wrapping myself up in exactly how great (or bad) something is, I simply turn the question into one with a yes/no answer. If something in my life — my house for example — is a three out of ten or better, great! It’s good enough for me. No need to work to change it. If it’s a two or a one, then maybe I need to think about something different.
This rule is, for me, a way out of perfectionism and optimization, because it sets the bar so low and because it gives me a yes/no cutoff for deciding when to make a change. It turns out that almost everything in my life is at least a three-out-of-ten or better.
What are other places that a binary mindset can be turned analog, with psychologically beneficial results? The most powerful is when you completely change the question you are asking, sometimes to one that is just existential and sometimes to one that is about your process.
Like this:
- Instead of asking about your body Am I too heavy? you can ask Do I have a body? or Did I workout this week?
- Instead of asking about your investments Did I make as much money as I should have investing last year compared to the market? ask Did I learn something new last year in investing? or Do I have a nest egg? or Am I following a specific investing plan?
- Instead of asking about your online publication Do I have 1,000 subscribers? ask Did I publish an article last week? or Am I putting myself out there? or Did that last article I published feel true to me?
The binary mindset is a paradigm shift, just like choosing recklessness.