Welcome to Every Day, A New Thought Show. I'm Thor Challgren. And today I want to talk about potatoes, perfectionism and the planet Mars. 

In the movie, "The Martian," the main character, Mark Watney, who's played by Matt Damon has a problem. He has a limited food supply. And he has to make it last until the date on which he can hopefully be rescued from Mars. Specifically, he has a certain number of potatoes, and he has to make them last until the rescue date. Spoiler alert, he probably lives and is okay. 

But the joy of the story is seeing how he gets through this challenge. He creates a ration schedule where he knows exactly how many potatoes he can eat every day. And if he doesn't eat them on schedule, he's going to run out of food before the rescue mission can get to him. So this is where perfectionism comes in. And this is a subject I talked about in a recent episode, and I'll put that in the show notes below. 

But I think perfectionism works this way in our own life, we think that there's a rationed amount of what we want. There's only so much to go around, and we have to make it last. Which means there's a perfect equation that tells you how much you can consume to make it all last, you know. Mark Watney describes his resolve in a very colorful way. He says, I'm going to science the shit out of this.

I think we do that with things in our life. We believe that there's one perfect way to use our resources to spend our time to spend our money. And because we think there's one perfect way, we run the risk of doing nothing, we don't act because we're paralyzed by the fear of not getting it right. 

You know, if this was Mark Watney, he would probably just throw up his hands and say, You know what, it's it's too complicated. I can't figure it out. I guess I'm just going to starve on Mars. Now, in Mark's case, he really did have a literal case of scarcity. He did have to figure out the perfect plan to ration his food. 

But for most of us, our sense of scarcity is self imposed. We think we only have so much time, so much money, so many resources. And so we go well, I guess I'm gonna have to just perfect the crap out of this to paraphrase that character. But do we know we have this vastness of infinite possibility in the quantum field, we think we're limited and that we have to choose perfectly but we're not limited we are on limited. 

So if you get stuck on perfectionism, because you think you have to make all your potatoes last. Remember that you are not facing starvation on Mars. Don't worry about being perfect. You aren't limited. You have all the potatoes in the universe.