Imperfect is my new mantra.

What if everything was imperfect?
Because it is.

There is no such thing as perfection. It doesn’t exist in writing, in business, in relationships, or in life. Once you accept that—really accept it—you can get an amazing amount of work done. That email you spent 30 minutes going back and forth with ChatGPT? Done in five. Just yesterday I fired one off to a doctor’s office and got my answer. Total time: five minutes versus a half hour.

Perfection is seductive. It sounds responsible. It sounds thoughtful. It sounds professional. But most of the time, it’s just procrastination dressed up as virtue. You could spend 365 days preparing your next email, refining a post, or “thinking through” a decision—and no matter how long you wait, it still won’t be perfect.

That realization is freeing and allows you to move at lightning speed.

Two great lines say it better than I ever could:
Voltaire: Perfect is the enemy of good.
George S. Patton: A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

When I look back honestly at my own life, I can count on one hand the times I truly went off half-cocked and regretted acting too quickly. Those moments exist—but they’re rare. What I can’t count are the times I put things off for days, weeks, or longer, convincing myself I was perfecting them. Tweaking. Refining. Waiting for the right moment.

Winner move fast, imperfectly, to win the game of life.

Most of those things either didn’t matter as much as I thought, or would have benefited from being done sooner and imperfectly. Motion creates clarity far more reliably than contemplation ever does.

This is an argument against paralysis. Against confusing preparation with progress.

So for 2026, the rule is simple: less perfect, more done. Imperfect is not a flaw—it’s a virtue.

PS: Some will see your first draft as more perfect than your last—and definitely more you and more real than the one with 100 paragraph breaks and emojis.
Sorry, ChatGPT.