Half Ass is Better than No Ass

Dear perfectionists,

Hello! I too am a perfectionist. I like to do things the ‘right’ way and the ‘best’ that I can. (Well some things, at least. ;->) Very often I end up not doing things at all, because the guaranteed way not to fail is to not even try. The trouble is it’s also the guaranteed way not to succeed. Or learn. Or improve so you can reduce the chances of failure.

A couple of years ago we decided to do some home renovations that required packing away a lot of the contents of our house. My intention, my desire, was to do this in as optimal a way as possible. Wasn’t this a great opportunity to thin out our excess stuff? What I failed to consider is that the reason our stuff needed cleaning out is because both my husband and I are messy geek hoarders. Decluttering our possessions a task that had been put off for many years and had grown in scale considerably. We couldn’t schedule the renovations until we’d packed most of our things away, and at the rate I was going, it would be years until I made enough progress to do that.

I grudgingly gave up on the idea of being able to go all Marie Kondo on our stuff. But even if all I was doing was packing things away, I at least ought to take the time and effort to pack things in as logical a way as possible, right? I did work on packing like we like, as well as labeling boxes well, but again, at a certain point I got bogged down with dozens of half-empty boxes strewn around the house waiting to see if there were more items of that category to be packed up. My house was drab and boring because there was no art on the walls, no tchotchkes to enjoy. And all the the thing I did see every day was the worn out disgusting carpet we wanted to replace.

I sat down and had a look at the options and was hit with this truth:

Half-ass is better than no ass.

There may be a best way to do something, there may not be. But if you’re frozen in place waiting for time or knowledge or confidence or whatever other factor to manifest, what you have now is nothing. You can decide to take action in what will be a probably non-optimal way and end up with something, or you can continue to do nothing and have nothing. I think that something is better than nothing.

I invite you to join me on the path of half ass and see if you agree! I mean, it’s worth a shot, right?

This donkey figure is available from Reaper in metal. And now I kinda want to paint it again because I think I’d approach it very differently now with a looser but livelier half-ass approach.

A version of this donkey loaded up as a pack animal is available in both Bones plastic and metal.