Many of us are perfectionists, to some extent, and are afraid that the things we do might not be up to par. This is especially taxing on mental peace if we put so much value into what we do, as if somehow our value came from what we did. The problem with this, I’ve found, is that rearely (if ever) anything I do for the first time is perfect.

In the software development world there’s a thing called iteration (it probably exists in other places too, but coding is my background). Iteration means that you work on versions, version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, etc. This means that your product doesn’t have to be perfect on its version 1.0, you can always make it better. 1.1 will be better than 1.0 and 10.0 should be even better.

How do we apply this to everyday life though?

I found that once I started treating things I did as iterable I got so much mental peace. I wasn’t constantly worrying and stressing to get everything perfect, I treated it as version 1.0 of whatever it was. I knew that whenever version 1.1 came out it was going to be better and I would just commit on improving without trying to get it absolutely perfect the first time.

It’s okay to get things wrong, it means we’re doing new things, it means we’re trying. No one is born an expert on anything. Getting things wrong could mean the beginning of a learning experience, sometimes that’s fun and sometimes not so much, but it’s still better than doing nothing.

This may or may not be my way of hyping myself up to write on Medium.

Those were my thoughts on iteration, what about yours? Did this make sense? Let me know!

-Marcos