The harder you try to do something perfectly, the harder it becomes to do it at all.
You spend hours preparing for a presentation because you’re worried about making a mistake. You rewrite the same LinkedIn post ten times because you’re not sure it’s good enough. Or you put off recording a video because you hate how you look and sound on camera.
But what if the answer isn’t to take it more seriously?
What if you need to make it a little ridiculous?
That’s what one of the world’s best video game players accidentally discovered when he broke a world record dressed as Super Mario.
The world record nobody expected
On Halloween 2026, a 22-year-old gamer known as Niftski was livestreaming himself playing the original Super Mario Bros.
He’s what people call a speedrunner. Rather than playing a game normally, speedrunners compete to finish it in the shortest possible time.
And Niftski is one of the best in the world.
He’s spent years practising the same game, learning exactly when to jump, which enemies to avoid and how to exploit tiny tricks that save fractions of a second.
The competition is so fierce that players now measure improvements in milliseconds.
But this particular livestream was a little different.
Niftski’s viewers had donated $1,000 to make him dress as Mario and speak in the character’s ridiculous Italian accent for the entire stream.
So there he was, wearing a red Mario hat and a fake moustache, playing one of the most technically demanding games in the world while doing a terrible Mario impression.
And then something unexpected happened.
He started playing incredibly well.
As he progressed through the game, Niftski realised he was on pace to break the world record.
There was just one problem.
He really didn’t want to achieve it dressed like this.
He started begging for the run to go wrong, complaining about his uncomfortable moustache and the embarrassment of potentially making history while pretending to be Mario.
But the run kept going.
He defeated Bowser, completed the game and broke his own world record.
His final time was 4 minutes, 54.299 seconds.
That’s just 33 milliseconds away from the theoretical fastest possible run under the category’s rules.
And he’d done it while speaking in a ridiculous fake accent.
Why being ridiculous helped
Afterwards, Niftski said the Mario costume had actually helped him perform.
“It made me not nervous at all,” he explained.
He was so caught up in the joke that the usual pressure of chasing a world record seemed to disappear.
Which is interesting when you consider how much time he’d spent trying to achieve this.
He hadn’t suddenly become a better player because he put on a fake moustache.
He already had the skill. He’d spent years developing it.
But on this particular day, he wasn’t worrying about whether he was about to make history.
He was busy being an idiot on the internet. And that might have been exactly what he needed.
Why trying to be perfect can make things harder
When you care deeply about doing something well, it’s easy to become overly concerned with how you’re performing.
Imagine you’re about to deliver an important presentation.
You’ve prepared carefully, you know your subject and you’ve rehearsed what you’re going to say.
But as soon as you stand up, you start monitoring yourself.
Am I speaking too quickly? Do I look nervous? Was that sentence clear? What if I forget the next point?
Suddenly, you’re spending so much energy judging your performance that you have less attention available for the people you’re trying to communicate with.
The same can happen when you’re writing, creating or trying something new.
You become so worried about producing something excellent that you struggle to produce anything at all.
And there’s research suggesting that anxiety can interfere with creative performance.
A 2011 analysis of 59 research samples found that anxiety was generally associated with worse performance on creative tasks.
This doesn’t mean pressure always makes people perform badly, or that making a joke guarantees better results.
But it does suggest there’s a cost to worrying excessively about whether you’re doing a good job.
So it can to give yourself permission to be bad at something before you can do it well.
Try making it deliberately ridiculous
One of the things I enjoy about teaching improvisation is watching what happens when people stop trying to be clever.
If I ask someone to come up with an interesting idea, they might hesitate. They want to say something original, intelligent or funny.
But if I ask them to give me the worst idea they can possibly imagine, the pressure changes.
Suddenly, they have plenty to say.
They’re no longer trying to protect their reputation. They’re playing. And often, buried inside those terrible ideas, there’s something genuinely interesting.
You can use the same approach when you’re struggling with perfectionism.
If you’re nervous about recording a video
Instead of trying to record the perfect introduction, deliberately record a terrible one.
Use a ridiculous voice. Exaggerate your gestures. Pretend you’re a wildly overconfident television presenter.
Then record a normal version.
You’ll probably find that speaking naturally feels much easier after you’ve given yourself permission to be silly.
If you’re struggling to write a post
Set yourself a challenge to write the worst possible first draft in ten minutes.
Don’t stop to edit. Don’t worry about whether anyone would want to read it. Just get your ideas onto the page.
Once you’ve finished, you can start improving it.
An imperfect draft gives you something to work with. An empty page doesn’t.
If you’re preparing for a presentation
Try rehearsing one version as an exaggerated character.
Give the presentation like a dramatic movie villain, an enthusiastic children’s television host or someone who’s impossibly excited about spreadsheets.
You might discover a gesture, a change of pace or a way of explaining your point that you’d never have tried while attempting to sound professional.
Then bring the useful parts back into your normal delivery.
The point isn’t to make a fool of yourself in front of your customers or colleagues.
It’s to create a space where you can experiment without worrying about getting everything right.
You can take your work seriously without taking yourself so seriously
There’s an important distinction in Niftski’s story.
He wasn’t making a joke because he didn’t care about the record.
He cared enormously. He’d spent years practising, refining his technique and pushing himself to improve by tiny fractions of a second.
But for one evening, he stopped treating every attempt like the most important moment of his life.
And he played.
I think that’s worth remembering the next time perfectionism stops you from starting.
You don’t have to abandon your standards or pretend your work doesn’t matter. That’s crazy. You just need to find a way to make the first attempt feel less intimidating.
Write the bad draft or record the silly video. You can always improve it afterwards.
