Is Perfectionism a Curse?
Yes, quite often it is.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately.
Growing up, it seemed like perfectionism was a good thing.
Teachers wanted your papers to be error free or else they marked them up, and the point of doing projects was to get a 100. Any points off led to disappointment.
I don’t mean to say I was actually perfect by any means, but there was a lot in place to reinforce perfectionism.
Now, I’m beginning to see that perfectionism is not always a good thing. In fact, often it’s not.
Consider this scenario.
On one side, you can have a software engineer who hasn’t created a perfect product, but releases it to the world anyway and begins to charge money and earn a profit.
On the other side, you have an engineer who’s a perfectionist and isn’t ready to ship his product until it’s 100% perfect and error free. The problem with this approach is that nothing’s ever perfect. This route leads to continuously working on the product but never shipping.
Fast forward 2 years, and the first engineer has a business that’s earning $1 million a year, while the second is still waiting to launch his first product. Engineer #1's business still isn’t perfect, but he’s making money. Engineer #2 is not.
This kind of approach can be applied to a lot of disciplines. Authors like Jeff Goins don’t start out writing perfect prose. They write and write and write, improving their skill as they do. Eventually, once they land a book deal, it’s not because their writing is perfect, it’s because they shared something with the world in spite of it’s imperfections.
Now by no means am I espousing shoddy work. Conscientiousness is good and is one of the things we admire so much about entrepreneur’s like Steve Jobs. He cared about the details and built products that wowed people because he did.
Plum.io (a company that provides a remarkably effective test for pre-interview job candidate screening) teaches that there are two qualities that matter the most in prospective employees — intelligence, i.e. IQ, and conscientiousness, i.e. how hard they work and how much they pay attention to details. If your employees have those two qualities in spades, they’re going to excel at pretty much anything they do, but if not, there’s nothing you can do to make them above-average employees.
With that in mind, it’s good to be conscientious and it’s good to pay attention to details, but it can also be crippling if you’re too much of a perfectionist.
This essay is a great example. I’m sure there are grammar mistakes, all of which my wife who’s the best editor I know could point out after a quick proofread.
But does it matter? High school English teachers would say yes, but in reality no. This isn’t an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal. It’s an essay to share my thoughts on Medium. If I’m too worried about perfect grammar, then there’s no way I could write and publish this essay in 15 minutes.
So the lesson is this: It’s a good thing to be conscientious, just make sure it doesn’t stop you from shipping your product because you’re limited by perfectionism.
