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CHAPTER 7
Use Data to Celebrate Your Imperfect Progress
week after Easter, I asked my friend who works at a church how the
service went. Easter is like the Super Bowl for churches. His answer
surprised me.
“It was good. The music was great. We had a solid turnout, but we lost a few
animals.”
“What do you mean, you lost a few animals? Like they went on a Homeward
Bound journey with Michael J. Fox voicing one of them?” I replied.
“No, we had a few animals die.”
For Easter, my friend’s church decided to have a petting zoo, just like they
did in the Bible. Unfortunately, church volunteers might be good at helping you
find an empty seat, but they’re terrible at running makeshift zoos.
The first animal to go was a rabbit. Apparently, a three-year-old did a suplex
off a hay bale and landed on the rabbit. The truth is, rabbits have really tiny
bones. They’re also not good at wrestling. They’re good at one physical activity,
but not so good at any others.
The second animal to go home to see Jesus that Easter was a duck. A little
kid hugged the duck too hard, in the neck. What do you do in that moment? Do
you give the lifeless duck to the family, kind of like the craft for that morning?
Cover it in a thin layer of glitter and voila, “Here’s your duck”?
My friend didn’t need to be told those two moments were failures. He was
well aware that they missed the mark. That’s the funny thing about failure. It’s
loud. You might never lose a duck on your watch, but you know when you’ve
blown it.
Progress, on the other hand, is quiet. It whispers. Perfectionism screams
failure and hides progress.
That’s the reason a little data can make a big difference. It helps you see
through perfectionism’s claims that you’re not getting anywhere and helps you

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through perfectionism’s claims that you’re not getting anywhere and helps you
celebrate your achievements.
Without data, progress virtually disappears. The problem is what I call the
“candle effect.”
When you light a candle in a pitch-black room without windows, the effects
are dramatic. Going from complete dark to light is substantial progress. The
difference is obvious and immediately felt. Lighting a second candle has a big
effect, too, albeit not as big. The third candle is still impressive, but not as
impressive. This diminishing continues until the impact of a new candle is
hardly noticed. The fifteenth candle would barely register on your brightness
scale.
We want our goals to have compounding interest, not diminishing returns.
We hope that with each passing accomplishment, the progress will grow and
momentum will build, but that’s rarely how things go.
Take running, for instance. The candle effect comes into play with mile
times. If you work hard and increase your speed from 3 miles per hour to 4 miles
per hour you’ll move from a 20-minute mile to a 15-minute mile. That’s massive
progress and all you did was increase the speed by 1 mile per hour. If, however,
you improve from 9 miles per hour to 10 miles per hour, you don’t cut 5 minutes
from your per mile time. You cut 40 seconds. The rate of improvement drops by
more than 80 percent.
The same goes with eating well. Let’s say you want to eat healthy for six
days a week and take one cheat day. That would mean, in a standard meal plan,
you have to eat well for eighteen meals every week. When you eat the first meal
well, you’re one eighteenth done. The second makes you one ninth done. The
third makes you one sixth done. What progress! But the higher you get in the
count, the less dramatic the progress gets. Whether you’re thirteen meals in or
fourteen meals in doesn’t really move the scale much. The big gains are gone.
Perfectionism uses these shrinking levels of success as proof that things
aren’t going well. Remember, in the middle of a goal, perfectionism is trying to
convince you that the results aren’t good enough and that you should quit. What
better way to discourage you than to point out your glacial progress?
Why do I want you to have a few points of data? Because when
perfectionism gets loud in the middle of your goal, I want a piece of paper with
the truth on it.
Perfectionism hates data. Why? Because emotions lie, data doesn’t.
Our emotions will give us a completely false impression of a given situation.
How do I know? Has every worry you’ve ever had come true? Have all the

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How do I know? Has every worry you’ve ever had come true? Have all the
fears and anxieties you’ve had come to fruition? Was it helpful that your brain
kept you awake at night thinking about something stupid you said four years
ago? Did every failure you were concerned about come to bear on your life?
Of course not. In the middle of the night, your emotions got you spinning.
Over and over you worked through the reason your boss said she wants to talk to
you tomorrow. It’s never a good thing; it’s only dire.
In moments like that, our emotions get riled up and tell us wild stories.
Not data.
Data cuts through all the noise.
It cuts through all the clutter.
It cuts through all the distractions and hype and hopelessness and anything
else that’s in your way right now.
In its wake it leaves you with everything you need to make a good decision
for tomorrow.
That’s all data is. A gift from yesterday that you receive today to make
tomorrow better.
To make the most of the data, we need to understand how it can help us, why
we hate it, and how to use it.