… abandons perfection
Perfection. Ideal. Impossible.
Perfection is an ideal, something which is simply impossible to achieve.
Perfection is a dream, a wish, a desire, and sometimes a compulsion, there’s some recommended reading, listening and watching which I’d like to point people towards:
TED Institute: Perfectionism holds us back. Here’s why. (Charly Haversat)
If you can’t do it perfectly, why do it at all? Recovering perfectionist Charly Haversat challenges our obsession with perfection in our personal lives, workplaces and beyond. Can we fight the crippling fear of failure and the unwillingness to compromise that it creates?
Why Perfect Is The Enemy Of Good (Pyschology Today)
Obsession with Perfection can Paralyze
The perfection detox | Petra Kolber | TEDxSyracuseUniversity
Petra’s “The Perfection Detox” talks about eliminating the need to please people. This talk is about working through the need to be perfect and is explained with humor, empathy, her own story and what she did to be able to drop the weight of trying to be perfect off her shoulders.
From my own perspective, achieving perfection is impossible. One important thing to consider is the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, where 80% of the result can be completed with 20% of the effort, or more importantly, that last 20% takes 80% of the effort, and is closely related to the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns, which says that for each extra piece of effort, you get “less” of an increase in the result compared to prior effort.
Let’s take an example for the 80/20 rule, when you learn an instrument, it may take a short period of time in order to be proficient, say 20% of the time, but to become an expert, you may need to spend 4 times that length of time… or 80% of the total time, and we need to decide individually, when we want to be proficient, and when we want to be an expert… and just when is “good enough” good enough for us, because each extra piece of skill requires greater and greater effort.
Looking at the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns, imagine you are hungry and eating a bar of chocolate, the first square is amazing, gives you a fabulous a taste sensation (“the return”), the next square tastes wonderful too, but maybe not quite but pretty close, and as you continue to eat the chocolate bar, each square still tastes good, but is a little bit less enjoyable than the prior one… and this is exactly what the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns tells us, one square is good, but two squares isn’t going to give you exactly double the enjoyment (return) than the first one did. The same idea applies as you learn, twice the effort doesn’t quite give you twice the return.
Instead decide what level of skill or enjoyment is enough for you, and decide that you are happy, just as imperfect as you are.
Bella
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