Although it may sound great to be a perfectionist, let me tell you that it is absolutely not.
To be clear, what I understand by being a perfectionist is someone who polishes every aspect of a given project to its ultimate tiny details. Your first instinct probably agrees with this attitude, but, in reality, such a behavior often leads to negative outcomes because wrong metrics are used to define what is “high quality” or “perfection”.
Imagine you are a journalist and are assigned to write an informative article about bread making for Health magazine. To add some realistic constrictions, you are given three days for handling the first draft because this work will be published next week.
Assuming that you are not an experienced baker, you probably have to do some research beforehand. You introduce the topic by mentioning the history of bread and the raw materials involved. Since it is for a magazine focused on health, you may state its benefits and harms. Then, you give a brief summary about the typical baking process and finish with recommendations for further readings.
Although this is a fairly good execution, it is not in the eyes of a perfectionist. Trying to achieve what they consider as “high quality”, a perfectionist would extensively explain each type of bread and the role of each raw material. Afraid of leading to misunderstandings, he is not satisfied by only citing references, but he would expand on dough fermentation and baking conditions. Because of such an obsession, the perfectionist ends up spending his free time in order to deliver on time, often causing sleep depravation. Not only that, the article turns out to be too technical and too long for the journal’s readers.
Do you see the problem here? The problem is the metric used by the perfectionist to evaluate “high quality” or “perfection”. While the magazine’s goal is to deliver short articles of the interest for its readers, the perfectionist aims to cover all edge cases with extensive explanations. Such a person may argue that if given few more days, the article would satisfy both his and the magazine’s standards. But, the reality is that there is always a time restriction to be respected.
With this particular example, I want to emphasize the importance of have clear metrics and constrictions. This is essential to balance trade-offs for an optimum outcome. Sometimes good enough is more perfect than perfect. Don’t be afraid of imperfections because it all depends on what filters are they evaluated with. This doesn’t mean to neglect quality, but rather to adapt the definition of quality.
I was a maniac about tiny details. In a sense, I am still one nowadays, but I learnt to organize my priorities. Let’s take this website as an example. The old me would have been obsessed with the fonts, the text colors and the exact sections and subsections before publishing it online. I would have gone on to make the perfect blog post template and the best-looking home page. Maybe I would have twist the types of comment section boxes and the newsletter subscription. I would have felt overwhelmed by the amount of work, without mentioning that it would have required months of my spare time!
The present me, in the contrary, publishes a far-from-perfect website, even with bad displays in phones and tablets. There are no comment boxes nor newsletter subscriptions. The sections change every few weeks and there are typos in the posts. The advantage of this approach is that I am free to test new styles and ideas, I can easily apply feedbacks from my friends and, the best of all, I don’t feel any pressure of being perfect!
P.S.: I started to reflect about embracing imperfections after reading the well-known book The Lean Startup many years ago. But I will save this story for a future post.