Optimizing Our Progress Toward Perfection

In Elder Scott D. Whiting's October 2020 General Conference talk, "Becoming like Him," he gave us the following bit of encouragement, which he called "a brief word of caution":

The commandment to be like Him is not intended to make you feel guilty, unworthy, or unloved. Our entire mortal experience is about progression, trying, failing, and succeeding.

I'm not sure where the "caution" comes in. This looks like a comfort to me. Maybe he's trying to caution us against feeling "guilty, unworthy, or unloved"? If anything, I think the following lines are more of a "brief word of caution":

You are good enough, you are loved, but that does not mean that you are yet complete. There is work to be done in this life and the next.

Progression is a tricky thing, partly because it's difficult to know our standing before God, how we should feel about ourselves, and how quickly we should try to progress. For instance, we're far from perfect, but we have the potential to become perfect. Feeling like we're so bad that we can never become perfect, is wrongful thinking, but so is celebrating ourselves for our potential to become perfect, but not actually taking the steps toward achieving that potential. We should not allow ourselves to grow overwhelmed or to grow lax.

We have to keep progressing toward perfection, though the pace itself can also prove challenging. If we try too hard, we'll burn ourselves out. If we don't try hard enough, we won't be progressing as quickly as we could. We need to try to find a balance. If you're burning yourself out, slow down, but don't stop. If you're comfortable at your current pace, try to speed up a bit and see if you can still handle it. If we regularly adjust our rate of attempted progress, we can optimize our progress to our ever-changing capabilities and circumstances.

We have a lofty goal ahead of us, and it will take an eternity an multiple miracles to reach it, but we can find a balance between loving ourselves and improving ourselves, and we can find the optimal rate of progress (or something close to it) for us in our present circumstances. We can become like Jesus Christ. It'll just take us a decent amount of work and a decent amount of time to do it.