How Perfectionism Is Holding You Back

Summary

• I've learned that perfectionism can be detrimental to business growth. To scale beyond certain points like 15 million or 30 million a year, letting go of control is crucial.
• Holding on too tightly to every aspect of the business may work initially, but it eventually creates a ceiling that hinders further growth.
• It's important to separate oneself from the business and recognize that they are distinct entities. This separation allows for a healthier perspective and further expansion of the business.
• To move past perfectionism, I had to accept that problems are a natural condition of business and not necessarily indicators of failure.
• I realized that striving for no problems created stagnation. Accepting and addressing issues can be a catalyst for growth.
• An example I faced was the rising cost of Facebook advertising; spending excessively on trying to combat this was ineffective. Accepting some conditions are out of control can help refocus on more impactful areas.
• One belief to overcome is the idea that a business must be perfect to be successful. Embracing imperfection can help a business grow.
• Another old belief I changed: perfection as a CEO is required for respect. I've learned that showing humanity fosters authenticity and better relationships within teams.
• I used to believe that if my business wasn't where I wanted it to be, I wasn't good enough. Now, I understand that unrealistic expectations require adjustment and patience is necessary for long-term success.
• I encourage moving forward by focusing on progress rather than perfection. This involves accepting that perfection is an impossible and unrealistic standard to hold.
• Deciding whether to be patient with your current strategy should be based on evidence and logic, not emotion. If the business plan is well-thought-out and supported by evidence, patience is usually warranted.
• Overall, embracing imperfection, being realistic, and practicing patience are key to moving past limits and achieving sustained business growth.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting by acknowledging that your business and you are separate. When a problem arises, don't take it as a failure on your part; it's just a business condition. Accepting this can make you more chill and not freak out over every little thing.

Then, you gotta let go of the need to control every bit of your work. You got your company this far with hard work, but to reach the next level, let other people help and don't sweat the small stuff. Trying to be flawless will just slow you down.

A good way to shift your mindset is to rethink what a boss should be like. You don't have to be perfect to earn respect. Be real with your team, and they'll trust you more. Plus, you'll feel less pressure to be perfect, which is actually better for getting more done.

Sometimes you'll think, "If I'm not where I want to be, I'm not trying hard enough." That's not true. Growth takes time. Stick to your game plan and be patient. Even if you're itching to speed things up, acting patient will help more in the long run. Just take a deep breath and trust the journey.

Finally, focus on progress, not perfection. Instead of getting stuck trying to make everything perfect, deal with issues as they come. Remember, every big name out there took time to hit their stride. Give yourself a break and keep moving forward.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"Perfectionism ultimately can cost you your business"

– Leila Hormozi

"If my business is not perfect, it is a business"

– Leila Hormozi

"Problems in business are normal and to be expected"

– Leila Hormozi

"There are no perfect conditions or solutions in business"

– Leila Hormozi

"If you continuously try to attain perfection in your business, you're actually going to prevent your business from growing"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

perfectionism ultimately can cost you your business how I experience this and some tips that I have in terms of how you can change your beliefs so that this doesn't happen to you so I was talking to a Founder uh last week and he was somebody that applied for acquisition.com and I'm not going to name names or talk about the business itself but this person had basically with root Force gotten their business to about 15 million a year and obviously 15 million a year is like no joke but the issue is is that oftentimes what we do to get our business to one level is what prevents us from getting to business to another level and people talk about this all the time perfectionism and standards of excellence to a degree are what get people to you know multiple eight figures but they will prevent people from getting to nine figures and what that is is that we have a huge level of control over our businesses and guys I know this because this is what I did with my business I was able to get our business to 30 million a year by holding on incredibly tightly but in order to get past 30 million I had to learn how to let go and so what I realized I was talking to that founder I felt like that person almost had too many limiting beliefs for us to be able to work with that person and the reason for that was because the beliefs that person held around standards of excellence what they need to oversee in the business that they need to be quality controlling every single Department to every little detail of everything that everyone did every day though that I had gotten them to 15 million that was the exact reason why this person was hitting a ceiling and had flatlined for the last year and a half and that was the exact reason why I didn't think they were going to be able to get to 30 or 40 million because a lot of that has to come down to self-coaching and understanding ourselves and being okay with letting go and not being perfect and I think that a lot of the times what it stems from is that we identify with the business and especially if it's your first business it's like your identity is meshed into the business and so if the business makes a mistake or has a problem we identify as being a mistake or having problems when in reality they're two separate entities and if you can separate yourselves and you can develop healthier beliefs around what is perfect what is not and perfectionism in general then we can grow our businesses and so I think a lot of the times what it is is that it takes a Relentless amount of execution perfect execution with tight controls in order to get a business to 10 million 15 million and even sometimes 20 million but if you want to get your business past that point then you have to let go of control you have to let go of the idea of perfectionism and I got slapped in the face with reality when I realized that my business wasn't growing because of my Tendencies because of my need for Perfection and because of my need to feel good about the business in order to feel good about myself so what happens is that if you can relate to this if you feel like oh I kind of am a perfectionist I never want problems in my business I never want to make mistakes right it's typically that we're looking at things as problems that are actually conditions of business okay so let me give you an example of what this means say that you think an employee is complaining or employees aren't getting along and you think that's a problem I see that as a condition of business now old Layla would say that's a problem people aren't getting along the snap Layla now says that's a condition of business it might be that one month you have low sales and you might think there's a huge problem in my business Layla might think maybe there was a holiday maybe it's seasonal there's so many other reasons for a slump in sales what I'm trying to show you is that there's a lot of things that we control in order to get our business to one level but we have to let go of those expectations in order to get to the next because the reality is that with every upside so if you want to grow your business further you also have to accept the downside right that comes with that and I think a lot of times we aren't willing to accept that downside and so we hold on Tighter and Tighter and then our business starts to Flatline and that's what we see and so what I want to share today are just really the three beliefs that I actually broke of myself and the three new beliefs that I learned to embody in order to grow my business past that point that I had flatlined so I hope you can do the same the first old belief that I had was if my business is not perfect then I'm not good at business replace that with the new belief which is if my business is not perfect it is a business listen businesses are not perfect and it took me a long time to realize this I used to think it was a problem if my business wasn't perfect and everything wasn't going well all the time problems in business are normal and to be expected if you're not experiencing problems in business it's probably because your business isn't growing it is that we try to have no problems which actually creates no growth but if you can accept problems your business will actually grow and so there are no perfect conditions or Solutions in business an example of this is that back in gym launch in the old days uh we had a time where customers were extremely upset about the cost of Facebook advertising and we had an entire research and development department where basically they were constantly testing new ads New creative to get the costs down as far as possible the reality was is that the cost of the platform is going to go up no matter what and despite spending almost a hundred thousand dollars a month in tests we couldn't fight the fact that the platform was getting more expensive we could get it down but we couldn't get it to where it was a year or year and a half ago I was so upset over this because I felt like I was doing a bad job I felt like I couldn't control this situation and therefore it was a problem I needed to fix the reality was is that what I needed to do is I would need to accept the fact that the platform was increasing over time and that there was only a certain amount of things that we could do to a reasonable extent before it actually was more of a deterrent so I spent you know I think there was over a year that we spent trying to fight the fact that this platform was increasing and I think about the amount of attention that I lost to that because I couldn't accept the fact that my business wasn't perfect right it's almost like Fighting Gravity I was like we should be able to get lower costs despite the fact that the platform Rising for every single other person it's an unreasonable belief and so if we can trade our beliefs for believing that if we have an imperfect business there's something wrong with us or we're not good at business and you can understand that if you have an imperfect business that it's probably growing and that it is just a business and that's a condition of business then you'll have a much easier time growing getting past the part that you're stuck at so the second old belief that I had was that if I do not perform perfectly as the CEO every day I will lose the respect of my customers my employees and my team and I used to really think that I used to think that if I didn't show up absolutely perfect every day I didn't say everything perfectly every time I didn't act perfectly every time I didn't remain completely composed every time that people would ultimately lose respect for me and they wouldn't want to do business with me or work for me the new belief is that if I don't perform perfectly as a CEO that I will give other people the space to also understand that they are imperfect humans and that they too cannot show up perfectly every day and that people will be more transparent with me and I'll probably have better working relationships I used to think gritting my teeth through it showing up perfectly every day pretending like I wasn't a human basically being like a robot was the strength of mine but what I realized was that showing up like that actually prevented me from having authentic relationships with my team and with my customers because not showing my mistakes made me unrelatable and so maybe you feel that way maybe you're growing your business and you feel like it's the first time you've done it and you're terrified so you don't want to show up you don't want people to think you're human right we want something that we're above everyone else for better than everyone else because we're the leader we're the CEO but the reality is that you're human just like everybody else on your team and if you can not hide things from people then they won't hide things from you and so the more likely you are to have a better relationship with everybody on the team if you can just be yourself and here's the thing that I realize is that teams that aim for Perfection and aim to hide things from each other will always move more slowly and they will always be more judgmental of one another and there will always be less trust and I saw that because I looked at the culture that we had on our team and I said why are people hiding things from me why are people judging themselves so harshly and then I just looked in the mirror and I realized it was because I'm doing that to myself and so I realized that if I wanted to change the culture of my team to have a team that was more cohesive that moved faster that wasn't you know afraid of being seen in a different light if they were having a bad or off day then I need to accept that about myself and so once I realized that being imperfect was a better goal than being perfect in terms of how I show up as a CEO I was able to move so much faster and I was able to have more transparency and better connection with everybody on my team the third old belief was that if my business is not exactly where I want it to be right now then I'm just not good enough to be there right I used to think if I'm not at a billion yet it's because I'm not good enough to be at a billion here's what I realized if my business is not exactly where I wanted to be right now it might be that I have unrealistic expectations and I need to be more patient so a lot of people judge themselves and I'll see them come to me and I see it I think that seeing it others has actually helped me see it myself more is they'll come to me they'll be like Layla I've been doing this for two years I'm only at 20 million why am I not X Y and Z yet etc etc like I don't understand why I haven't gone faster what is it that's a deficit in me and they're constantly searching for like what the deficit in themselves is and in order to grow and move and I look at them and I'm like dude there's no deficit you're literally doing all the right things I feel like you have all the right character traits and it's just a fact of the matter is is that these things take time if you look at most the billionaires in the world and people have made hundreds and hundreds of millions yes what we hear is all the stories of people who blew up overnight but most of them ninety percent of them it takes years and decades to get there and so oftentimes what actually prevents us from getting there is the fact that we think it should be going faster so we try to go faster we try to speed it up and by doing that we actually work against our plan and then we actually take longer to get there because we've taken so many routes or detours from our route and then we steer off the road because you're actually distracting yourself because you think you should be getting there faster and so the reality is oftentimes the way to get there faster is to move slower and just stick with the plan but we judge ourselves for the pace we judge ourselves for why we're not there yet and the reality is a lot of the times and I see this it's just that we just need time and you need to give time time it's like a good example of this is like I could judge myself and say like why am I not at a billionaire Layla well I sold majority stake in my other businesses and now I've started a new business which is only seven months old is it reasonable to think that a business that's seven months old should be at a billion dollars by now no is it exceeding the goals I've already set yes we've already surpassed our yearly goal yet I'm still not satisfied and so then I just tell myself I'm like oh I'm just not being patient and I see that so much in other people the thing is is that you don't need to feel patient in order to act patient so just because my business isn't where I want to be yet and I can think things like oh I may not be good enough like I should go fast for all these things I don't need to listen to those thoughts I can just continue to follow the plan and I can just behave as if I'm a patient person because the reality is is actions speak louder than words and so if you can act patient it doesn't matter the thoughts that occur in your head of wanting to go faster if you act that way then that is who you are overall what I want you to get from these three beliefs is the understanding that there is no such thing as perfect and if you continuously try to attain perfection in your business you're actually going to prevent your business from growing the fact of the matter is is that if you spend more time trying to move the business forward and not trying to be perfect you will actually go faster in the long run and how I Define perfectionism in this context is the refusal to accept standards that are anything short of perfect perfect meaning complete and without problems and so then I would go there and say perfect is unrealistic it is an irrational belief to believe anything could be perfect because the thing is is that we're making up the standards in our mind and so like I could say that this dinner is perfect and the next person could say that the dinner is imperfect what is the standard based upon it's not based upon anything rooted in reality it's based upon our perception and our brain so even if you try to make your business perfect you can't because it's only perfect to your standards and nobody else's so a lot of people ask me Layla how do I know that I should be patient in the current via climate like how do I know that I should be being patient versus doing something else and the question is what supports your argument to be patient do you have evidence to support that the path you're taking is logical and will lead to the outcome that you desire sometimes what people use as a reason to not be patient is emotion not logic right they're like I don't it doesn't feel good it doesn't feel fast enough right but if you look at the evidence have you laid out your business plan have you done the objections have you studied the market have you supported it with the fact that you like it and it's on your strong app and if you've done all the work ahead of time to lay out logistically all the evidence as to why this business should succeed then you should continue to follow that path now maybe if you haven't done that then maybe the answer isn't to be patient if you haven't done any work ahead of time but if you've accumulated all the evidence ahead of time to prove to yourself and to prove to the market why this is a good business the answer is patience so if you're wondering like if the vehicle you're in is one you should be patient with or you should change what you're doing I have a video where I talk about how to figure out what business to start and how to figure out if the business that you're in is right business for you and you can go check it out here