I was a bit of a dork in elementary school. Or a “browner” as the other kids put it.

A browner, and a perfectionist.

I was locked in ongoing competition with a guy in my class. We both ran for student council president (he won, dammit). Whenever the teacher gave us tests and assignments back, we’d compare marks. When we graduated the eighth grade, we shared valedictorian duties.

As an adult, striving for perfect has in some ways been helpful. When I was a newspaper reporter, it kept me off the corrections page—most of the time.

But it also gave me a lot of insomnia.

You see, trying to be perfect is not only silly, it can prevent you from moving ahead in business and in life. It can stop you from starting your business in the first place, or publishing a blog post, proclaiming your expertise, applying for a job…I could go on.

Here are four ways for maniacs like me to let go.

1. Accept that “perfect” isn’t a real thing. It’s like a fairy princess—nice to think about, but totally bogus.

From customer service to website copy to a…house, nothing is ever 100% flawless. There’s always a margin of error, because humans are doing it.

I love this Immanuel Kant quote. If you look closely you’ll see that nothing is perfect.

2. Remember that everyone is learning and improving, all the time.

When I told my friend Siedah Mitchum that I was struggling with the idea of publishing my first video (because it was good but not perfect!), she reminded me that everyone starts somewhere and gets better over time. She suggested popping over to the YouTube channel of one of my favourite video bloggers and travelling back in time to see where they started, and how far they’ve come.

Oh my goodness, she was so right! Horrible lighting, awkward expressions and meandering scripts. But the super cool thing is that they kept going until they were pro.

3. Make a small mistake and see what happens (likely nothing).

This is a funny one, but hear me out.

A friend of mine became an editor at fairly a young age. She was responsible for a publication more or less in its entirety, which was a huge responsibility—one I would have found pretty stressful at that point in my career. But although she’s also a self-proclaimed perfectionist, she kept her cool.

After signing off on her first issue, she told me a hilarious secret.

She let a tiny mistake get through. Deliberately! She couldn’t handle the pressure to be perfect, so she decided to signal to her brain that she wasn’t, and it wasn’t, and it was all going to be fine anyway. I didn’t completely understand her logic at the time, but now I do. Making a small mistake won’t kill you. If your brain is really fixated on being perfect, trick it into understanding that you’re not. You’re human. That’s better.

4. Push through that uncomfortable feeling and MOVE FORWARD ANYWAY.

Ever caught yourself in that loop of being ready to finalize or publish something, then going back to make one more small change, then hitting preview again, then finding one more thing, then fixing it, then hovering over the “publish” button, then going back to preview…yeah. That process is necessary—until it becomes ridiculous.

Here’s what I recommend. Write your blog post or email, make a rough cut of your video, whatever it is you need to do. Then walk away. Take a break. When you come back, you’ll have a fresh perspective with which to edit and publish. And that’s what you’re going to do—edit, then PUBLISH. Just do it!

That’s exactly what I did with my utterly imperfect (but hopefully kind of sweet?) welcome video.

If you also suffer from perfectionism, let me know if this blog post helped and if you have any other tips for curing it!