“Perfection is a Disease.”
Ann Mukherjee is a seasoned C-Suite executive specializing in transforming global companies by leveraging demand driven growth to drive competitive advantage. Most recently, Ann served as Chairman and CEO, Pernod Ricard NA, the second largest spirits company in the world. Prior to Pernod Ricard, Ann was Global Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer of the largest privately held CPG company, SC Johnson, overseeing businesses in over 90 countries. Ann has also served as President, PepsiCo Global Snacks and served as CMO for Frito-Lay NA.
Ann has also served on the boards of Mondelēz, Hertz and Sabra. In 2020, President Trump appointed her to the Economic Recovery Committee during COVID and she has also worked with President Clinton as part of the Clinton Climate Change Initiative. Ann currently is program director for the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago developing a new executive curriculum for next generation CEOs.
Ann is also a friend and a big supporter of The Athena Project on Modern Leadership that Drew Ianni and I co-founded and was our guest on Unbossing. Unbossing is a podcast with leaders on how to lead and not to boss, how to manage through a zone of influence and not just a zone of control and why the future is a fusion of learning and unlearning.
The 40 minute episode with Ann is a masterclass on four different subjects:
1) On Growing Ourselves : Why perfection is a disease and the way forward is to embrace our weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses are flip sides of the same coin. The key is to understand one’s strengths and weaknesses. Then build on areas of strength and learn how to compensate for the weaknesses.
Failure comes from not paying attention to our threats. In understanding our threats we can forge our opportunities and Ann teaches us how to do this with a SWOT analysis.
We are moving from an era of the “all-knowing” leader to the “all-learning” leader. Today it is key to “AI the shit out of ourselves” since we now have a confidant and mentor who can spar and train us.
2) On Growing Business: The secret to the companies that deliver total shareholder growth is one simple thing. Organic Growth. Not financial re-engineering. Not Mergers and Acquisitions. A ten year study by the University of Chicago builds the case for marketing and growth with data no Board can refute.
Businesses are about getting humans to work together with other humans to make and sell things to humans. It is as simple and complex as that. Forgetting the human part is losing the plot on how to run a business.
Great leaders recognize that each company and era has its own system. While Kraft and Frito-Lay were both food companies their systems of manufacturing and distribution were so different that it was only through unlearning and starting with a fresh sheet of paper did Ann thrive.
On the other hand, the differences between private and public companies may not be as great as one thinks. Operators still have to report to the owners whose name, focus and entire financial worth may be in the company the operator is running.
Beware those who run the same playbook when the rules of the game have changed.
3) On the importance of Creativity: Creativity is the oxygen to growth. Creativity unleashes potential. Creativity is understanding core human truths.
Ann aligned organization and drove SC Johnson growth with one line that united all the teams and the brands around the globe:
“SC Johnson helps women get off their knees”
This clarion call recognized that SC Johnson made cleaning products and around the world it was mostly women who cleaned.
Similarly Ann team won a Cannes Lion and scored the highest rated ad in the Super Bowl by understanding the core truth at the heart of Doritos which was:
“Break the Rules”
In 2006 decades ago just when User Generation Content was being born the Frito-Lay team outsourced creative to users. This not only broke the rules but also enabled Frito-Lay to have hundreds of creators to offset the hundreds of millions of dollars that Anheuser-Busch had to make and test ads for the Super Bowl.
4) On Life: It is a harsh world and it is tough. One can have work and family but often it is hard to have everything at the same time. Ann left her CEO job to focus on helping her husband recover his health knowing she could not focus and do a great job on each highly important and urgent task of running a company and helping her husband in his hour of need.
A key is to understand what gives you joy. Ann on a flight made a list of what gave her joy and then used AI to suggest how to rethink her life to ensure more joy.
Sometimes to pursue what you want you need to “break the rules” of ones own.
Ann decided after her husband recovered not to return to corporate life but to become a teacher and film maker focusing on a CEO program at Booth and launching her own film company.
Her film company and the U of C role allowed her to reconfigure her love of creativity from growing brands to growing people by give “voice to the voiceless” in her film company and guidance and advice to the next generation of CEO’s.
Ann reminds us that we should embrace our entire selves. The good and the bad.
Listen to podcast. It will rock you. You will learn. You will be inspired. You will be moved. All in 40 minutes.
On YouTube:
On Spotify (also available on every podcast platform):
One Single Thing.
The Daily Spark
Torsten Slock is the Chief Economist of Apollo and his daily spark newsletter contains a single chart and an analysis. One can access every chart and subscribe here (free): https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/insights/daily-spark#page-1
Here is his latest:
The Messiness Is Your Moat.
Luis Gariçano’s insight that AI autonomy declines with job messiness reveals an important truth about which work faces displacement. It’s routine, transactional roles that are vulnerable, not the complex relationship-driven work we assume is most at risk.
As tasks grow messier, AI capability stalls while human judgment becomes indispensable, drawing an autonomy threshold that protects messy work from replacement, see chart below and video here.
A Guide to Thriving.
Photograph by Rekha Tobaccowala | Provence. France. July 2026.
1. Success is the freedom to spend time in ways that gives one joy.
Success is sought by all but what is being sought?
For some it is making a mark in their field or leaving some enduring work.
For others it is seeking financial wealth or creating and nurturing a family. For some it is helping others.
For most people success also means a measure of happiness.
In the end if time is all we have then success probably has to do with how one uses time.
Ann Dillard wrote that “the way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives”
When one is financially constrained one’s mind and time are colonized by making ends meet.
When one is physically in pain or suffering from ill health it is often hard to be happy.
So, if happiness is the ability to limit the time we spend about our financial or physical situation and for most of us a certain amount of financial and physical well-being is key to being happy.
Sooner or later once these basics of not having to worry about the next rent check or waking up the next day in pain are mostly under control, the words and emotions that link the happy and successful are those of purpose, meaning, connection, flow, recognition and growth.
And these can change over time and are different for different people.
But it all comes down to having the freedom to allocate one’s time in the the way gives us joy.
How do we want to spend our time, and can we increasingly get to a place where we spend more of it in ways that give us joy?
Photograph by Rekha Tobaccowala | Provence. France. July 2026.
2. “Do not price yourself out of your dreams.”
It is often said that “it is never too late to become what we are” but for many people by following the wrong star home we lose our way. We spend most of their lives not being us. We find ourselves not “fitting” in our lives, our jobs, or our relationships.
The ability to control one’s time and find fit is inversely related to how much time one must do things to pay the bills.
Diminishing expenses can lead to expanding options.
One of the hardest decisions is to decide when one has “enough”.
Increasing one’s options by limiting one’s possessions and way of living tends to lead to more success than maximizing one’s possessions.
Pursuing “more” might force one to do work that one does not particularly enjoy or work with people who bring us down in order to pursue what the world says matters but not our heart.
Doing things that we resonate with and gets us into a flow is not only great for being happy today, but it is often a key to becoming an expert, to master and be a leader in what one does.
Photograph by Rekha Tobaccowala | Provence. France. July 2026.
3. “Do not live in other people’s minds”.
“Comparison is the thief of joy” but so is living one’s life to run up points on somebody’s else’s scoreboard of what success is.
The rise in mental anguish among many is in part how social media has accentuated the need to look good in other people’s eyes.
Caring what other people think is human and often learning and getting feedback on how one can improve is a key to success so not living in other people’s minds does not mean not listening to or not caring what other people say or think.
It means stopping using their metrics and their rulers of success to determine the way we live our lives.
We should not give somebody else a remote control to determine our lives.
Photograph by Rekha Tobaccowala | Provence. France. July 2026.
4. “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”
While one may not agree with Hamlets’ statement that “there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”, our mindsets matter a great deal in how we perceive life, how we are perceived and the degree of success we may have in our varied endeavors.
In rapidly changing and chaotic times an agile mindset can be critical to success.
While there are many personal trainers to help sculpt our bodies into somewhat supple forms, there is a scarcity in those who can show us how to exercise our minds to be as flexible as they need to be.
Mindsets matter.
Growth mindsets. Learning mindsets. Generous mindsets. Realistic mindsets.
Optimism matters.
In the novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon a character is described as one whose “mood collapsed the room”.
While misery may love company, nobody likes being in the company of miserable people.
Optimism is not just an essential component of innovators but a trait that we must have if we wish to inspire folks to follow us.
“Woe is me, doomed are us” works for a few drinks in a bar, but at the workplace it saps energy, hurts culture and is just a plain downer. Pessimism is something we all wallow in, but it fails to show the way out.
We should avoid practicing self-oppression or self-defeat.
To upgrade one’s mood we need to change our environment by finding people who provide clarity, self-belief and energy while leaving behind those who traffic in insecurity, control and weakness.
Remember mean people are just leaking and oozing out their own self-loathing and internal bile. Do not get angry with them but take pity on them. ( This really pisses them off and we need to be judicious in baiting these pathetic bullies!)
Another way to be optimistic is to forget all the legacy nonsense one may have to grapple with and ask that if we had a fresh sheet of paper, our talent and our assets what would we do?
Every day is a new career beginning.
Tomorrow is where we will spend the rest of our lives.
Photograph by Rekha Tobaccowala | Provence. France. July 2026.
5. “Practice Compound Improvement”.
The single most powerful concept in finance is that of compounding.
Along with the need and pursuit of love and gravity it is one of the three most powerful forces in the world.
Compounding interest and compounding returns can over time create wealth or lead one to bankruptcy depending on whether one owes or owns capital.
In a world of change we all may want to consider another way compounding can help us grow in changing times and drive mental, emotional, and even financial wealth which is compounding improvement.
There is so much we cannot control in a world driven by global, demographic, social and technological change but instead of being buffeted about helplessly in a sea of chaos maybe we can try to control and build our ourselves to be better.
Let us build habits, rituals and behaviors that we control and not others.
Three learnings about compound improvement.
a) Discipline equals Freedom: This is the title of a book by Jocko Willink, a Navy Seal.
Basically, if we want to get a grip on the world we need to get a grip on ourselves.
Things are more up to us than we think if we are willing to work at it.
b) Never graduate from school: The world is changing so fast that many of our skills and expertise and mindsets need continuous upgrading. While many of us set aside time to exercise to maintain our physical operating system we need to also feed and exercise our minds an hour a day.
The power of this habit is that at the end of a year one will have spent 365 hours learning new things. The day we start dying is the day we stop learning.
c) Deliberate Practice: Anders Ericsson wrote a book called “Peak” which is the best study of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice involves three components
1) Immediate feedback, 2) Clear goals and 3) Focus on technique.
According to his research, the lack of deliberate practice explained why so many people reach only basic proficiency at something, whether it be a sport, pastime, or profession, without ever attaining elite status.
Getting better is about behavior, iteration and resurrecting oneself from setbacks.
Photograph by Rekha Tobaccowala | Provence. France. July 2026.
One Single Thing
Last month at Oxford Yuval Noah Harari gave a talk on AI and Human Civilization. It is really worth a listen…
A Key to Problem Solving
A key to solving problems is linked to the fundamentals of photography:
Many of the techniques used by the best photographers are the ones we can use to become great at problem-solving and add human value to AI processing.
The essence of photography
At its essence photography is driven by three variables:
a) Framing: What the photographer decides to focus on, how the camera is angled and positioned relative to the subject and what is left in and left out of the viewfinder.
b) Exposure/Lighting: This is a combination of aperture, shutter speed and how sensitive to light the film is (ISO speed)
c) Editing: Once upon a time with analog film only professionals had the tools of editing (darkrooms, chemicals, and papers) but today with digital capabilities of our phones we all can pre-edit by taking several test shots, give ourselves lots of editing options by taking a lot of pictures and then later with easy-to-use tools sculpt our pictures to our liking by cropping and filtering and more.
Life is Worth Living by Jean-Flavien Piquemal
The essence of problem solving
The best problem solvers tend to be good at three factors:
a) Framing the problem by asking the right question: They want to know whether one is solving the right problem. Today this might also mean developing the right prompt.
b) Getting the right input/data/facts so they can throw as much light on the problem: Can one get as much illumination as one can? What combination of prompts, engines and perspectives should we use to ensure that we have a multi-angled view on the subject.
c) Interrogating and iterating the answer: The first answers tend to be somewhat right and often led to additional questions or additional fine tuning before one reaches a more robust solution. Today this further editing, refining and curation in an age of LLM’s is called taste, or craft or art.
Mian Fan Noodles by Mingzu Liu
Leveraging the principles of photography to improve decision making.
1. Framing the problem: Three simple questions to ask before you address a problem or challenge.
a) Focus on the right problem:Often organizations and teams spin their wheels on either the wrong problem or do not frame their problem in the right context, time- horizon or challenger set. Solving the wrong problem fast and comprehensively is not a solution.
The US Auto Industry thought their problem was to enhance quality of their hardware against the Japanese or design their exteriors and interiors to drive desire for their product against the German luxury brands when the real existential challenge was to become adept at electric and software vs Tesla and address a decline in a desire for auto ownership due to rise of Uber and Lyft.
b) Ensure differing points of view: It is critical to look at a problem from the right angle and ensure different viewpoints are included in problem definition. One reason companies miss the forest for the trees is they fail to have diverse voices and backgrounds involved in strategic problem solving. Diversity is not just critical for ideation but to understand what the issues are.
Too many traditional publications failed to adapt to digital in part due to not having technical folks and younger folks who were comfortable using digital media having a voice in the room where decisions were framed. As Boards become more diverse it is critical that they ensure that there is diversity of voices and backgrounds and not only a diversity of faces.
c) Choosing what problems to look at and what not to tackle: The best photographs often result from tight framing and often the best solutions come from the tight definition of the problem.
Many times, we might try to solve problems that are so broad that they are never solved because either it requires too many people or too many resources or too much time.
Heat by Valery Hache
2. Ensuring the right exposure: In the world of problem solving the aperture is how much data you decide to look at, shutter speed is how much time you allocate before a decision must be made and ISO is how much leeway (graininess) is acceptable.
a) Quantity and Quality of Data: If the inputs are not correct or valid then it is unlikely the outputs will be. After framing a problem correctly, it is key to ensure that as much valid data, input, and learning is brought to the solution.
One reason the original WeWork imploded was that the key data they overlooked were from the industry they really were in (real-estate leasing) and rather they focused on the ones they were not relevant (software, luxury experiences) in how they valued themselves and raised money.
b) Speed of decision making: So often problems do not get solved since there is a demand for more information, more data, and more input. Delay and dithering should be avoided by putting tight deadlines on decision making.
Too many organizations spend time ingesting lots of inputs and look at their colon in many ways but end up with no real output.
In another vernacular to solve a problem one must sooner or later emit or get off the pot.
Sometime though one rushes too fast and hurried decisions to make deadlines can also hurt an organization.
c) Sensitivity of impact of solution: If one is not going to being blowing up a photograph one really does not care about graininess and can use high ISOs to capture night views. On the other hand, if one is planning to print something on a large wall at an exhibition one must ensure much less graininess and therefore much more time and care needs to be taken.
Jeff Bezos has often noted the difference between revolving door and shut door decisions. If a decision can be revoked or changed without significant damage one needs less input and time but if a decision is difficult to undo and has long lasting or wide-ranging impact, then one must need to be more circumspect and speedier in decision making.
It is important before one begins to solve a problem one understands the sensitivity of the solution. How often have we procrastinated, and process driven a decision to death or run up huge costs in “studying a problem” when just saying yes or no quickly would have been smarter?
Red Door by Thaveechai Sirikulthada
3. Editing the solution: The initial or first answers to a problem are not picture perfect and require three forms of editing.
a) Cropping: Sometimes the solution is correct for smaller subset of people or geography or clients and thus some honing and exceptions need to be made before announcing. Todays AI bloated decks need massive cutting to be usable.
b) Filtering: This requires involving different people to look at the solution to get diversity of perspectives, interrogating the solution and particularly the inputs to ensure they were correct and interpolating with other wisdom and experience. Even truer to find the fault in inputs or hallucinations in an AI tool.
c) Displaying and Sharing: How, when, and where one shares the solution will determine how it will be evaluated and accepted. Too often the best of solutions goes awry because the right folks were not brought into the loop before announcement, or the announcement was made without the right sensitivities or tone of voice.
Next time one solves a problem we may want to look at what makes a great photographer or a photograph and think about how we frame the problem, how we determine the process of how much data, how much time and how sensitive the impact of the solution will be and then be ready to edit and hone the solution to maximize the impact.
It is a great way to bring human intuition, human insight, human imagination and human ideas to alien intellegence.
One Single Thing.
A great source for photographic inspiration is Leica Fotografie International that can be found here:
It includes a large number of free resources including a photo of the week and an amazing photo magazine that you can subscribe to.
From a distance …
The impact of many experiences we have, the people we meet and places we visit are often best appreciated from a distance.
A distance of space and/or time that allows for the right perspective, hidden meanings and appropriate reflection that reveal and deepen.
Truths and forecasts shared that initially may feel like delusions and hallucinations but time proves them true and we wish we had acted and listened when we first heard them.
Situations or people we take for granted but realize their importance when they are no longer there.
Carly Simon in “Anticipation” sings that she “will stay right here because these are the good old days”.
The joy of finding lost things.
The Poet Kate Ryan writes of the “joy of finding lost things”
All of us have lost things and sometimes re-found them.
Often not.
A set of keys, a wallet, a passport.
Sometimes a child in a crowd and sometimes a friend after an argument who we make up with.
Other times it is our health or a home or a job.
When we lose something, we often feel more pain in its absence than the joy we had in its presence.
Whenever we have the opportunity to recover it, we appreciate it more than ever before.
An exercise from the Stoics is to imagine you have lost something to appreciate what one has.
As the line goes “we do not know what we have until we have lost it”
The regrets of omission versus the errors of commission.
Study after study of people at the end of their lives find that what gave them the greatest joy were relationships and what they most regretted were not things they had done but what they had not done.
The errors of omission versus the errors of commission.
Time and distance make people regret the people they did not reach out to share their feelings with, the path less traveled they did not take and that “person” they saw but never talked to.
Here is a single minute from Citizen Kane about “that girl in white” about an opportunity not taken which is one of the most powerful scenes from a movie with many of them:
Often a moment of time is pregnant with possibility and then it passes. Over time one begins to realize that door wide open has now shut close.
The time and opportunity may not come again.
Time and “the ordinary day”.
In the future the ritual of the ordinary day will be special.
Life does not have to be lived forward and understood backward if we decide to pay attention.
Be aware of the fading moments of now.
Look around you. Watch the special quality of light or listen to the hiss of the air duct.
Treasure the conversations and even the repetition and lack of differentiation of day after day.
Because one day it will not be so…
“Carpe Diem” as expressed by Joan Didion.
The late and famed essayist Joan Didion once wrote about the distance we travel from our own selves and how as time moves forward and people, places and hopes come and go people are shaped by what is no more.
“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day is not at all”
But in the end Didion notes we go on by forging new stories and finding new places and begin forgetting.
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
But one must forge ahead…
“Do not whine...Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
And to college graduates a few years ago she made the case for living deeply…
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
All images created by Rishad Tobaccowala using MidJourney
One Single Thing.
Among the very best thinkers about AI and its implications is Ethan Mollick.
He writes a free Substack named “One Useful Thing” which is a must read. He is the author of a great book called Co-Intelligence and his new book Co-Existence is available for pre-order
His latest post “The Twilight of the Chatbots” will make you really think…
A Beginner’s Mindset.
Janet Foutty spent 33 years at Deloitte.
In her last two roles she served as executive chair of the board of Deloitte US from 2019-2023. Previously, she served as chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP.
Three years ago she left Deloitte and began again.
Janet focused on a major, a minor and an extra-curricular in her next era. The major and minor involved the future of the workforce in an AI age and women’s health, while the extra-curricular focused on supporting women in leadership roles.
Earlier this week we heard about the RAISE US to help the American workforce adapt to the AI age and her appointment as its President, Corporate Partnerships.
A small extract from the press release:
Gina Raimondo, the 40th U.S. Secretary of Commerce and 75th Governor of Rhode Island, and Eric Holcomb, the 51st Governor of Indiana, today launched RAISE US, a nonpartisan national organization that will partner with governors, employers, workers, and training organizations to help the American workforce make a successful transition to an AI economy.
RAISE US will design and pilot new corporate incentives to retrain and redeploy workers, new approaches to support people through job transitions, and new training models tied to changing employer demand. The organization will leverage private and philanthropic capital to scale what’s most effective and measure success by whether workers land and keep good jobs.
Leading technology companies Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation are coming together to help build the workforce response to AI as RAISE US anchor partners.
The entire press release: https://www.raiseus.ai/news/release
Though we first met each other a decade ago as part of our previous leadership roles, I have got to know Janet more over the past 18 months. We reconnected via the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Education and my friend Jason Wadler the founder of The Wisory. Janet has also been kind enough to join and contribute to The Athena Project on Modern Leadership that Drew Ianni and I co-founded. In addition, Janet participates in a class I teach on CEO Legacy for the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Executive Education Program.
Janet joined Drew and I on Unbossing to share her learnings about leadership, her passion for women’s health and how AI will impact the workforce. We discussed what she had to learn and unlearn as she stepped away from Deloitte and much more. ( While Janet had under strict confidence shared the broad contours of her new role with me a few weeks ago we did not discuss this on this episode since it had not been announced yet.)
The tightly edited conversation takes just 30 minutes to listen to and is at the bottom of this post. Here are some highlights.
1. The three keys to thriving at work.
Janet believes the three keys we need for career satisfaction is to ask
a) Do we respect and feel connected to the people we work with and for?
b) Do we enjoy the work we do and over time do we feel we are growing doing the work?
c) Are we recognized for our accomplishments and fairly rewarded for our contributions?
Janet stayed at Deloitte for 33 years by ensuring that she navigated here career in ways that all three remained true.
These are great stars to steer our careers by.
2. Exiting with elegance is rare but something we should all strive for.
Too many leaders stay past their “ sell by” dates.
Few accept that each career has a midnight hour and the smart people leave at five to midnight.
The best learn how to untie and loosen ties versus cut ties.
Exits are as important as entrances.
3. A challenge is to balance a new start with the halo of the previous career.
Janet shares ways on how she ensured Janet the individual and Janet from Deloitte were not seen as the same person. How does one separate oneself from what one did for 33 years?
While Janet was offered many opportunities in proximity to her Deloitte career, she wanted to do new things and not go back to what she had already done.
Janet reminds us the trick is to launch a new chapter without repeating the chapter one has lived in a different way. The challenge is find ways to leverage the positive halo of the previous chapter while writing a new story.
Many people who work for many years in one company or in one profession will learn how to combine one’s roots and wings.
4. A beginners mindset is key but unlearning is difficult.
After 33 years at Deloitte Janet had to begin again without the crystalized knowledge that comes with understanding a place as she understood Deloitte, without a world class team to help her deliver ( but as she notes modern technology helps), and to prepare in new ways for the people and organizations she was now helping.
Transforming oneself is as difficult and exciting as transforming a company.
And in today’s AI age we will all have to reinvent ourselves.
5. Women are not smaller men.
Janet’s passion for women’s health in part comes from her understanding that much of the medical research and medicine has treated women as smaller men even though women are very different and have their own issues including over indexing in a variety of areas from alzheimer’s to auto-immune depression.
6. Diversity is a competitive edge and most leaders are aligned with this.
Most CEOs have significant data, research and real world results that show that a diverse table of talent generates great economic results and innovation.
They may not preach this loudly but they are practicing this in their firm.
During our “Profiles in Courage” section of The Athena Project events we constantly hear this reinforced as leaders share how they are “ adjusting the narrative but doubling down on the mission”.
Take a listen:
One Single Thing.
Granted which is Adam Grant’s Substack this week has a wonderful piece on how to avoid letting perfectionism hold us back.
To counter perfectionism, here are some basic messages that parents, teachers, and coaches can reinforce:
1. Mistakes don’t make you a failure. They make you a learner.
2. Achievements are not a symbol of your worth. They’re a snapshot of your performance.
3. Beating yourself up doesn’t make you stronger; it leaves you bruised. Don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to a good friend.
4. It’s impossible to please everyone. Decide whose opinion matters to you—and whose doesn’t.
5. Character is not revealed by how many setbacks you face. It’s forged by how you face them.
6. People gauge your competence mostly by your hits, not your misses.
7. The objective is not to be the best; it’s to get better. The person you’re competing with is your past self, and the bar you’re setting is for your future self.
8. Our biggest regrets aren’t actions—they’re inactions. Don’t set yourself up to wish you’d taken more chances.
9. Healthy goals include two targets: an aspirational result and an acceptable outcome. If you fall anywhere between them, you haven’t failed.
10. Success is not a straight line. It’s a squiggly line.