When we’re young, we tend to view the world in very black and white terms: circumstances are really wonderful or super awful; an experience is either the best thing in the history of awesome things or the worst thing that ever happened; people are wholly good or purely evil; something’s either right or wrong. There’s very little “wiggle room” for the gray areas and two-sides-to-every-story choices that we as adults often find ourselves facing. It’s simpler. It’s also less forgiving.
We learn to process nuance as time goes by, but that doesn’t mean we always abandon this all-or-nothing mode of thinking entirely. When you can categorize a decision or activity in the simplest possible way it eliminates the need to pay attention to all that stuff in the “mushy middle” where ambiguity and doubt live. But it also eliminates the wiggle room we need to accommodate our flaws and missteps, in all their imperfectly human glory (okay, “glory” is probably the wrong word, but you know what I mean). When there are only two categories available and one of them is bad, how do we judge ourselves if we mess up? If my own experiences are any indication, the answer is: “harshly.”
It’s tempting to want to go all-in on something, especially when you’ve had to psych yourself up to make a change or attempt something that you’ve been dreading. “Go hard or go home,” right, Coach? Somehow we think that committing ourselves 110% to a goal and not allowing room for any mistakes or hiccups or false starts or failures is the only way we’ll succeed, and if we can’t do that, well, why even bother to do it at all? There’s the perfect way to do something, and there’s...not doing anything, I guess?
Because that’s exactly where your mind goes when you’re stuck in this simplistic, binary way of thinking. It’s the right way to do something or it’s such a doomed enterprise that you don’t even bother to try.
It’s perfect or it’s worthless.
One or the other.
And the reality, almost always, is somewhere in between. That dreaded mushy middle. In the political discussions on the outer blog we often hear that “perfect is the enemy of the good” argument, and as sick as we might be of hearing it, it applies to behavioral change too: don’t let the rigid need for doing something (in this case, quitting) perfectly the first time get in the way of even making a [possibly flawed] attempt — or six attempts, if that’s what it takes.
People are complicated. Life is complicated. Changing behaviors is complicated. We might wish it were otherwise, but generally it’s just not. Go out there are try anyway. You might even surprise yourself.
Who’s Your Little GUS Buddy?
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