Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

giving yourself a margin of error

24 Apr 2023 · 1 min

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In this brief monologue, the speaker shares a personal productivity and mental‑health tip: deliberately allocate a 20 % margin of error to your tasks and expectations. By treating a portion of outcomes as acceptable failure, a perfectionist can reduce anxiety when things don’t go perfectly, re‑frame setbacks as belonging to a pre‑defined “error bucket,” and maintain momentum without obsessing over flawless results. The advice is presented as a practical, experience‑based strategy the speaker adopted over the past year.

Chapters

Give yourself a 20% margin of error. This is by far one of the best pieces of advice that I received in the past year. I think that as a perfectionist, it's challenging when things go wrong, and giving myself like a baseline percentage of error of like 20% of like things are just gonna go wrong. And then when things go wrong, I'm like, cool, they're in the wrong bucket, and it's not gonna be everything, but it's also like everything is not gonna be perfect all the time. Um, so yeah,