As they say, the enemy of now is later; it is also said that the surest way to fail is not to try. I can completely understand the perfectionist impulse, but at the same time, it helps to realize that your best odds are, indeed, to try now. From trying and learning, you're maximizing your chances, which is as damn close to success as you can possibly get in an uncertain world.
You will always learn something, I assure. Even if you fail and suck at it, you'll learn at least one particularly approach did not work for you, review and consider an alternate approach.
Say if you played a chess game, and you epically failed, allowing your opponent to take the center and then slaughter you. While shameful, on postanalysis, you can notice that you opened with your d2-d4, black copied with d7-d5, but then you cockily moved into a kingside attack while ignoring the obvious additional defender that black had from his queen. As a result, you miscalculated, you lost your center pawn when you attacked, allowing the black queen to take a commanding position on d5 without counterplay from your knight. From that point on, things went to **** when black tore into your pawn defenders, isolated pawns, and destroyed you.
Upon awareness of this, in future games, you can just move one additional defender before commencing on a kingside attack, securing future games.
And as far as research, it does take a some awareness and observation, but you can sometimes tell a bit about a person from very little information. Does she wear cutesy stuff? Does she try to appear as a tomboy? How does she try to present herself to the world? Shy? Outgoing? Religious? Posh? Etc. Everything tells you something about her, and allows you to modify your approach to her, if you wish.
ANd yes, just shutting up and doing it is a good idea. If nothing else, you've known that you've been brave and did the best thing possible for yourself, and that's worth a hell of a lot.
