Perfectionism – How To Deal With It

Muhammad Alshareef

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Channel: Muhammad Alshareef

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Salam aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakatu. Welcome to tonight's episode of The Daily Mass community huddle, sending Peace and Love all around the world. Hey Sam, where you're from? sha Allah Tada. We'll get started in a few moments.

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Whether we hit 100 People First, or we hit the top of the hour, whichever comes first, we will begin the score right now I think is four two in favor of hitting the number first. Good stuff guys. Share it, start a start a watch party and get your peeps on the session. Let's begin.

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teach those late comers a lesson.

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They'll never forget

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our first time of the evenings hydrolytic Madame

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salaams Where are you from?

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sponsored by wasa in Hungary liquid cinema bar in Oslo Ozzy land Holika Muslims from Island Dallas thanks for tuning in every day. Hussein in Italy you're lucky because safe I mean, I think Muslim you bet you buy

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Your Mama says mostly tea mostly without milk. If you want to tap your inner childhood memories

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not in tea with milk without milk.

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As now the biggest Visionaire fan ever and I was on an

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exam Moroccan

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Netherlands Radek Madame au Mezzes from Kobe, Kobe land of this stakes, Kobe Japan. A Cena in New York queens. I visited Queens long time ago. Unison Texas are they gonna slam

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almost says mature in Kuala Lumpur. Nice tea with milk to be direct Mr. Lamb

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tofield in Egypt Dalek Muslim are you from an Egypt tofield Minara in London Shakeela and UK Shirzad in Trinidad Eunice says no tea for me. Alright guys, we're at 86 We haven't hit a hot oh, we went to 90. Are we gonna hit 100 Before the top of the hour or not? It's 97 now

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Oh 99

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Oh, and we hit 100 before we hit the top of the hour that was closed. Let's get started. Take one I set out on equal I happen to live in a ghetto Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala Rasulillah ha to Allah he will be my mother. And my bad. Good Morning, Vietnam. Welcome to today's session. We're talking about perfectionism. So we start off in the Sierra when Allah subhanaw taala

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speaks about Ramadan fasting when Allah subhanaw taala speaks about Ramadan fasting, fasting actually, you know whenever people are asking what is fasting and you say to abstain from food and drink from from from fetcher until McRib. In fact, when fasting was first ordained and commanded, it was

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abstaining from food and drink and marital relations from

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from Asia till McGraw, meaning that the only time you had to eat and drink and marital relations was between Maghrib and Isha. And if you know the time between Meldrum and Asia is is something like an hour and a half. So that was the fasting it was an hour and a half to eat, drink or drink water or metal relations, all of that stuff, and I should time will come and then fasting would begin

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The next day. Now the companions and companions of the Prophet said Alana is and I'm and Allah subhanaw taala reveals in the Quran this is in surah This is uncertain Baqarah verse 187, Allah subhana wa Tada says,

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I lean along and come come to afternoon for circum that barley Kumar Alpha comm that Allah subhanaw taala says that Allah knows that you used to deprive yourself, contact us then you did the piano on your cells that Diabolik Marfan comm so Allah subhanaw taala had mercy upon you and forgave you. The point here tonight's tonight's reminder is about perfectionism. And Allah subhanho wa Taala when these companions weren't able to do the fast from Aisha to Maghrib, the next day, Allah subhanaw dadas response to them was with mercy and Toba and forgiveness, and that they come back and Allah subhanaw taala made it easier for the Companions, all the alarm for all of us that the fasting is

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from Phaedra to mother, but not from Aisha till Maghrib time, perfectionism. So perfectionism is

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it's this silent killer, it you know, it kills you before you even get started. And this is how perfectionism works. So let's suppose you want to clean your room, right? You probably have a dirty room around you right now. So you probably said to yourself, one day, I will clean my entire room in one shot. And because you cannot perfectly execute that, like cleaned the whole room in one shot, you decide to do nothing. If your room is clean, then what about your closet? What about your closet? You tell yourself, I'll only clean it when I can do it all in one go. Let me give you another example. Let's suppose you say, oh, I want to write a book. I want to write this ebook. I

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want to do some you know, something like that. You tell yourself one day I will sit down and do all of it in one shot. And then it doesn't happen because you can do all of it in one shot. You tell yourself, I'll never do it. And it's very subtle. This is the perfectionism I have to do everything perfectly, or I will do nothing at all. Or somebody will say in this comes for a Doha as one sister who recommended this this topic tonight. She said that what if I have this big long door hotlist. It's like, Hey, I've got 15 pages of drawers. And because you want to make dua for everything, you end up saying, I don't have time for this, I don't have time to sit down for 45 minutes and read

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through my whole list. So you don't make those drawers either. Let me give you one more example. Let's suppose you signed up for a class and right now there's lots of amazing online classes, you probably signed up for something and here and there. And then you miss one of the classes. And then you tell yourself yeah, some how it says this is so me, who else does this resonate? Because we're all like this, I'm telling you, even if you're not like this in one area, you're like this in some other area. Another example is so you have a class and you tell yourself, I'm going to do all the lessons and every day I'm going to tune in and I'm going to sit for one hour and I'm going to do

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this this and that and then you miss one day perfectionism smashed. And then you tell yourself, okay, I'm done. This wasn't perfect. It didn't come out perfectly. So Hollis. That's it no more. So this is what perfectionism does for us. It just kills our dream. We have this standard that everything has to be perfect every day. And if it's not perfect, then we will do nothing or or we will end this and so I will talk about that today. Insha Allah. So Allah subhanaw taala says in the Quran,

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you read along become a Yusra, whether you need to become a nurse Allah subhanaw taala speaks about the fasting and says Allah wishes ease for you use while you ready to become an officer and does not wish hardship for you. And so when you're approaching this, you've got to approach it this perfectionism, you've got to approach it with that attitude of I want to make progress and if I don't, then it's okay, I can tune up tomorrow so I wasn't perfect today. I wasn't perfect this week. It's okay. And mercifully come to the next day and the next day and just say hey, just because I wasn't perfect yesterday doesn't mean I can't be perfect

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I can't be perfect today. So here's some some practical tips on how to deal with perfectionism how to deal with perfectionism things like like I said, cleaning your closet or writing a book or finishing a class that you've done.

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purchased and it's just sitting there the videos or something like that. And those kinds of things are your go hotlist, that's so long that you don't have the time to go forward. Focus on. Now, this is the advice that I got. And it didn't actually fully work, but it does work. And I'll tell you how it works. So this was the focus is on making progress versus getting it done. So instead of telling yourself, I'm going to focus on completing this, focus on making progress on this, instead of focusing on completing this, focus on making progress, and it sounds nice, but in practicality, it might not work. So this is how I do it. Or when I'm in the right mood, because I totally

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procrastinate is perfectionism, all the stuff, you tell yourself where you set your alarm for something like two minutes, whatever feels comfortable for you like something like that you would be little, whether it's five minutes, or four minutes or two minutes, set your alarm or a countdown for, say, two minutes and tell yourself, I'm going to write my book, or I'm going to start cleaning my closet for two minutes. And that's it, I will do nothing else, or for four minutes. And that's it, I'll do nothing else. I'll do another four minutes or another two minutes if I feel like it. But if I don't feel like I'm done for the day, two minutes, four minutes. And then once you do that,

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you'll find that the two minutes, there's so much barakah in it. And you've started to make progress, you started to make progress on that thing. Yeah, cleaning the closet, doing a class whatnot, keep lowering the goal until you do something. So let's suppose we're talking about a class, let's suppose there's a class you registered for. It has online videos, and stuff like that. And you say to yourself, I'm going to sit down for one hour every day. And now it's been like three weeks, you haven't you haven't logged in or something like that. So you tell yourself, you know what I'm going to log in, and I'm going to watch for five minutes and five minutes only. And that's it,

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I'm done for the day. So you're making progress rather than telling yourself I want to complete this, you know, when I was memorizing Quran, little kid.

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And I found a lot of people when they start memorizing Quran, and they have this attitude of, I want to finish the Quran so that I can be a half. And I find I found that those people don't succeed. And it's similar to people who are, they go to a karate class and say I'm here because I want a black belt. That because there's so much effort, and a journey that goes from that first class till maybe four years later, six years later, when you finally get the black belt, that if your goal is only the end result, if that's the only goal is the end result, then everything between you and the end result is a burden and a hindrance. It's blocking you so this showing up every day for karate class

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is actually blocking you. That's why people get frustrated, what am I going to get my black belt? What am I going to get black belt? Or if they're memorizing the Quran? That could be like, oh, when am I just going to be a half of what am I going to be a half, I just want to be a half and then get this, get this over with. You've got to love the journey because the end result is only like, what 1% of the journey is the end result? You made it to the end like Wow, great advice. Sorry, wow, you made it to the end like good for you. That's only 1% You've got to love the journey. If you love the journey, then you'll make it to the end. So when I was memorizing Quran, and I was on the journey,

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every class, and every page of the Quran that I memorized, made me so excited.

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And I was like, here's, you know, 12 year old Muhammad, I'm sure you've memorized one page of the Quran. And I'm like, wow, I've memorized one page of sorts of Bacara. I memorize two pages and I go, wow, memorize two pages or memorize three pages. I'm like, wow, I memorize three pages, and four pages of five every single class. I kept saying to myself that I'm so happy for the journey. So you want to fall in love with the journey, not the end result. This is a reminder for me because even as I'm saying that I'm looking at things that I've been procrastinating I've been throwing perfectionism, perfectionism in it and I and I'm saying to myself, yeah, the problem is that I keep

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focusing on completion. And that's not the goal. The goal is to love the journey. How do you love the journey and if you love the journey, then you'll make it to the end inshallah Tada.

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And the other thing that I want you to do, the final advice that I'll give you here is

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pat yourself on the back and really celebrate when you do make these make this progress. I have this challenge or bring it challenge. I call it bring it it's a course that we teach but in that the concept is you get a whole bunch of things that you need to get done. Give each of these

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items, if they get done, give yourself 10 points. And the aim is to try to get 100 points in a day. So what I would do when I've come to the end of the day, if I hit 100 points, normally, if I'm not counting, you know, 100 points, meaning giving everything that I got done on my to do to do lists.

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If I get 100 points, I completely celebrate like day well done. But on days, when I'm not counting, I always feel like oh, I could have done more. And I always come to the end of the day, like I didn't, you know, I wasn't perfect, I didn't get everything done, blah, blah, blah. And that's not the right attitude, the better attitude is you want to come at the end of the day, make the goal, you know, make it challenging, no problem, but make progress. And at the end of the day, tap your shoulder, tap yourself on the shoulder and say I made progress on this. So let me give you some examples of things that we've mentioned, and how to do make progress. So if you wanted to clean your

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closet or clean the room, instead of telling yourself that I'm going to clean this closet completely, tell yourself I'm gonna pull my alarm for four minutes, and clean as much as I can for four minutes, and then I'm done. And then the next day, you know how to just make a habit. I'm just gonna keep cleaning this for four minutes every day. And then I'm done. If you're talking about writing a book, and this is like some big thing that you're trying to do in one sitting, instead of telling yourself I'll only be happy when the book is completed. Tell yourself I'm going to sit down for five minutes, put my alarm on my countdown timer, I'm going to sit and write and enjoy the

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process. Give myself a nice cup of hot tea with milk or without milk. And and just start writing for five minutes. And then when I'm done, I will enjoy the experience. Yes, so we're talking about loving the journey not necessarily hyper focused on the end result. If you have a class that you've that you've registered for, and it has these videos that you haven't completed or something like that, then tell yourself instead of me focusing on completing this class, let me enjoy you know, five minutes of this class 10 minutes, maybe 10 minutes is too big, maybe even five minutes is too much. And you tell yourself if five minutes even five minutes is too much. Tell yourself I'll only

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do it for two minutes. Back in the day when I wanted to read more Quran I started telling myself that I try to make it the minimum I will open the most half and read one area of the Quran. Like can you at least do that and make a habit open the most half read one area and then one that one area becomes half a page becomes one page becomes a quarter becomes one just you just start building up this habit and routine. Well Allah Tala Arlen, is there any questions about perfectionism? I will give you 30 seconds to post your questions. If there's no questions, I will just sign out

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meanwhile, I will Google quotes on perfectionism and find some words of wisdom for you to end this this amazing

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Yes, so this quote says perfectionism is just an excuse for self criticism.

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Okay, so

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what's the first question says if you have three big doors that you want to make, and you need to give solid attention to each one? Should you just make each one with general kind of broad wording so that you say the dogs? Yeah, sure. So what I what I recommend Watson for what I've been saying is that if you think of a meal, sometimes there's a snack some there's sometimes there's fast food, and sometimes there's this long gourmet meal. And I tell people for dollars, there are times when you have like just time for a snack, make your drawers snack format, or sometimes it's like you know, after a prayer, just have, you know, a few moments, you can make it like a regular meal type of

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door. And then other times you could be awake at night, you've got all night long, and you want to go at really long with these dogs. So it's not that you do one or the other have three versions of your dog's snack, regular meal and long gourmet meal size and make guys like that.

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This comment from hmm about memorizing Zama into a game, so gamifying the journey

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a word of caution about gamification, so Yamama I've because I'm excited about gamification, and we're taking a course on gamification and stuff like that. One thing about gamification is

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If If the purpose of what we do is the game, then a lot of times it belittles the higher purpose of what we're doing. So for example, somebody's memorizing a Corolla, or give you an example, if somebody's trying to go for a Phaedra in the masjid, and then they start gamifying it. So they say, Hey, if I go for federal give myself 10 points, if I get 100, you know, 10 vendors in a row, then I'll go out for breakfast at IHOP or something like that. The problem with that is Federer is such a noble and it has, there's so and it's and it's difficult, you know, like changing habits, sleeping early, and stuff like that, that a breakfast at IHOP, after 10 days, after a while the person is

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like, I don't care about breakfast at IHOP. And I don't care about these random points. So gamification, even though a lot of people try to apply it to change customer behavior or consumer behavior, it a lot of times it doesn't work. So there has to be more to it. And that goes into like the why, why are you doing this? Why do you care about it. And that's the love of what you're doing. And then on top of that, if you love what you're doing, and then you put some game, gamification elements, on top of that, that's great. Some of the best gamification elements are gamification when you're working as a team. So

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like World of Warcraft, they're like, masters of gamification. How do you get people to play so long? It's an online virtual reality type of I don't know if it's virtual reality, but.

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And they found that getting people to work as a team is much more motivating than leaderboards, or one person winning and one person losing. That's just a side point. But does that sound good?

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So Bushra says my daughter tries to be perfect in everything. How do I stop her?

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I stop her as she stresses over things.

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I just brought to mind one of these, one of these villains, how do I stop her from being perfect?

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I would say we're sure that this this feeling of being perfect applies to all of us, not just your daughter. We all when I said earlier, I'm like some people have this thing about they want their rooms to be perfect. Maybe your room is clean or not. What about your closet? So we all got a room? That may be perfect, but a closet that is not so we're all doing this in some kind of capacity?

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What comes to mind to maybe helper is going through this like a five steps. So what would happen if you weren't if you didn't do this perfectly? What if you didn't get 100% on this exam? And then there was a well, if I didn't get 100%, then you know, my teachers gonna be mad at me or something like that. Okay, so what then what would happen? And then then, like, if my teachers mad at me, then my teacher will hate me. And then so what then what will happen? Then if I keep doing this, then you know what, I'm not gonna get into university as if right then what will happen? And you kind of take them along the journey of what are why are they doing this? What is the perfection, perfectionism

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leading to and go like, five levels, and they might find the ridic. Like, once you kind of like spread it out? Why is the person doing this, then they can see for themselves look, nothing bad happens. If I'm merciful with myself a lot. That's just a quick answer. But of course, there's more to perfectionism than just that.

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neuron says, What about when your peers are progressing super fast, but you cannot match their perfectionism. You cannot. It's not perfectionism. So if your peers are moving really fast, so let's suppose this happened to me, actually, in Medina university when I was studying in Medina,

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and I was really young, I'm 18 years old, 19 years old. And there were students who actually came from their countries like from Algeria, who actually had Islamic study degrees before they came to Medina, they were doing double degrees. So I would be sitting in an exam for an hour and 45 minutes. It's a two hour exam, and these guys are leaving after 15 minutes. And it's very, you know, what you're talking about, like somebody's progressing super fast, and then you feel like, oh, I need to be perfect to be like them. So I told myself that even though these guys are, you know, finishing the exam so quickly, number one, they're losers because they're doing double degrees, and I'm not

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doing a double degree. So I pat myself on the back for that. And number two, I'd say just because this person finished their examined 15 minutes, inshallah Tada, it'll take me an hour

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Hour and a half. But in the end, we'll have the same mark. So I told myself, or somebody is strong in one area and not necessarily strong in another. So for example, the same person, maybe this Algerian student, who got such a high a mark, and I got such not high mark, at the end, maybe I opened the Islamic Institute, and this student wants to work at my institute, because I was better at managing, you know, building Islamic organizations, and this person wasn't as good. So you see, you can be better at one thing, and that other person is better at something and then your team up, hence, that's why motivation, you know, like I said, working in teams is better than trying to just

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trying to beat the other person.

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Next question.

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One last question. And we will be done. I'm just trying to

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find that question.

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No, no, we're not quite sure.

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So this is interesting. This is a it's kind of like a different somebody was saying, Why do you have more sisters taking your courses? I II visionaries.

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I don't actually believe that to be true. I think there's a lot of sisters that take our courses. But there's a lot of brothers that take it as well, I think that you might be coming to this conclusion based on who talks more. So sometimes, you know, let's suppose let's suppose we're here on the live, there's 100 people, and then you might be seeing their sister sisters. And like, there's a lot of sisters, but there's brothers here, they just don't type. It may be not their nature. They don't like chatting and talking as much, or they like to talk in different

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in different scenarios, like, I don't know, maybe if they were playing an online game, and they're chatting with other buddies, they would chat more. So far, we've actually done stats, and it is actually kind of 5050 and there are other courses that I've done, where there are more brothers than sisters when I taught niche hero Nishiura which was like business building Muslim, you know, social entrepreneurship, that actually had more brothers and sisters. So just for your information.

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Is that a lie? Alright, guys, let me end with a really cool quote about perfectionism.

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Ah, yes, here's a good one. So in In conclusion, here's my amazing quote. Perfectionism is the mother of procrastination. Perfectionism is the mother of procrastination. Does that go off and on until we meet again, my friends tomorrow at the top of the hour 3pm New York time in Charlotte Tana, a Santa Monica Rahmatullah.