I recently tore through Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich. In it, other than the nitty-gritty details about how to get your finances in order (easily the best $8 I’ve ever spent), the main takeaway is to find the 85% solution to your problems. Essentially, overcome analysis paralysis through settling for a slightly less-than-perfect answer, but one that saves you a significant amount of time, effort, and anxiety.

This is applicable in so many domains!

One example I’ve applied is through applying Naval Ravikant’s advice on quitting books. He advocates for a simple approach: You don’t get worked up about skimming and quitting a blog post once you get the relevant information, so treat books the same way. There isn’t time to read every book, so you need to concentrate on the best books. For more on this, check out Johnny Uzan’s “Everything I Knew About Reading Was Wrong.”

Another strategy is for promoting change on a macro level. In The 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss posits the question about sustainable change. Which is easier—one person living vegetarian the rest of their life or several friends all doing one vegetarian day per week? Sure, we’d significantly cut back on greenhouse gases from the industrial farm industry if we would all just go all-in on a vegetarian lifestyle, but is that really sustainable? I don’t think so.

Back to finance. We recently found ourselves in the exact situation Ramit discusses: most people won’t make a move toward financial security because they’re paralyzed with finding the best solution. I’m sure we could have found a much better fund for our kids’ 529s and my wife’s Roth IRA, but we went from not having anything in place to a very reasonable option, capitalizing early on that compound interest. It reminds me of Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One. It’s much harder to go from nothing to something than it is to iterate on an 85% solution. By getting investment accounts started, I’ve taken the stress off of not saving for our futures. Now, when I find some time, I can log back in and play around with the funds our accounts invest in. Or not! Anything is better than nothing, and our money will continue to grow.

This is a hard lesson for perfectionists like my wife and I. That last 15%, though, is exponentially more difficult. I leave you with an expression a military instructor used frequently: “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”