Progress Over Perfection
Newsletter from October 15, 2025
Hi dear student,
You might wonder if I am always in such a positive and productive mood as portrait in my Newsletters. The honest answer is NO. Just like everyone else I have days where everything seems to fly easily off my never ending “to-do-list”, and days where I would love to stay in bed (with a good book), pull a blanket over my head and order a take-out café latte straight to my bedroom.
But here is how I like to look at these days in another way:
a) it is completely ok to feel like this sometimes!
b) it might in fact help us to initiate some changes in our lives if this becomes a chronic situation.
c) and finally, there are a couple of great things we can do to get us back into a more satisfying and productive state of being.
Let us first contemplate a valuable Philosophy: “Progress over Perfection”.
Right here, we have one key to help getting us out of bed in the morning. We do not need to be perfect, despite what all those voices in our heads make us believe. As Joseph Nguyen phrased it poignantly, “Don’t believe everything you think”.
Wherever and whenever our thinking of perfection was instilled into our being, it might now be time to let it go. The idea of perfection all too often stops us from taking the crucial little steps in making progress. No child would learn to walk, no pianist would learn to play a Beethoven Sonata, none of my students would ever build any puppet if they would not focus on approaching their tasks only one humble step at a time.
First step today might simply be to get out of bed, make a cup of coffee, sit for a while and feeling grateful for this new day, the legs that carried us out of bed, the smell of coffee, the computer or smart phone that connects us to the world and with a crazy puppeteer in Iceland that keeps sending you letters with his curious contemplations.
The amazing thing is that these simply humble steps are more powerful than we might think. I find that the attitude of gratitude and acknowledging and celebrating each simple step can indeed introduce yet another fine day full of great possibilities, like building wooden puppets or whatever it is that you decide to do.
So here’s to getting out of bed, a good cup of coffee or tea and making some progress one humble step at a time; sounds just about perfect to me.
Best regards from the Whale Fjord in Iceland,
Bernd
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