Something Beats Nothing, How Overcoming Perfectionism Changed Everything
The one factor that held me back in many areas of my life
All throughout my life, I’ve struggled immensely with comparing myself to others. This problem has become even more apparent now that I’m studying computer science. The term for this is imposter syndrome, and it affects many STEM students who find themselves constantly comparing their abilities to others.
I’ve noticed that this mindset often impacts my productivity. I felt like I needed to be in the perfect environment, the ideal mood, with the right energy levels, at the perfect time of day, on the best day of the week, or even the right month of the year just to get things done. But this struggle highlighted an even deeper issue for me: perfectionism.
For the longest time, I believed that if I wasn’t in the right mindset to study or if my environment wasn’t optimal for productivity, then it wasn’t worth doing anything at all. This mindset followed me throughout high school, leaving me unhappy and, frankly, a pretty mediocre student. Most of the time—probably 90% of it—I didn’t feel like studying, so I just didn’t.
The turning point for me was when I read Atomic Habits by James Clear. Clear talks about how repetition beats perfectionism, which was exactly the issue I was grappling with. He explains that the frequency of doing something matters far more than the intensity or duration. The key is that as long as something gets done, it’s better than doing nothing at all.
That’s when I discovered the concept of non-zero days. The idea is simple: every day, I should do at least something—no matter how small—that gets me closer to my goals. Whether it’s 3 hours or just 30 minutes, as long as I do something, it counts as a non-zero day.
So I made a promise to myself from that day forward that everyday, I would do a small action that made me better than I was the previous day. Even if the action was extremely miniscule as the title states, something is always better than nothing.
Eventually, I found myself getting through the initial hurdle of getting things done much more effectively, and slowly but surely my issue of procrastination was slowly fading away.