Olivia Remes, a mental health researcher at Cambridge University, believes you shouldn’t keep waiting to do things perfectly at the perfect time—instead, do it badly. This is a strategy that can help to gradually cultivate optimism and encourage people to try new things while understanding that failure will always be part of the process. "Our inner voice of criticism continually stops us from doing worthwhile things," Remes told the BBC. “Jump straight into action. Do things and accept that they might initially be done badly. When you do that, most of the time the results are actually not that bad—and they're almost always better than doing nothing." In short: get out there and try something new!