Excellence is not perfection

The recent period has seen me taking a big life decision, which involved leaving my job in a startup where I’ve worked at for over six years (this calls for a dedicated blog post, which I’ll write once things have settled down for a bit). As a result, in order to make clarity on what to look for in my next gig, I found myself thinking about what I value in my work.

For context, I have worked for 10+ years in software development and engineering leadership, and my last role has been Engineering Manager in the aforementioned company. Given my background, I made a list of what I consider important and one of the topics that quickly popped in my mind was “technical excellence”. It sounds like one of the cool things to say these days and, as often when this happens, it got me thinking: why am I saying this in the first place?

What is excellence anyway?

While I think many people can intuitively relate to the idea of (technical) excellence, I found it an interesting question to dig deeper into and, potentially, agree upon.

Dictionaries define “excellence” as «the quality of being outstanding or extremely good».

So we can call something “excellent” when it stands out from the average or the usual (i.e. being good in an unexpected or surprising way).

What I find interesting in the breakdown of the definition above is that there seem to be no particular reference to any lack of flaws, or even for something to be in a complete state. In other word, something can be excellent while not being “perfect”.

How come we get the two concepts mixed up?

Perfection is a very hard state to achieve for right about anything: it is usually a rather arbitrary definition of how our work (or ourselves) should look like in the end.

If it sounds to you just like a really good Definition of Done (DoD), you might want to think again, for two reasons:

1. When striving for perfection, our DoD remains, well, undefined. With every new edge case we spot and we need to take care of right now, we can’t seem to let go of that sense of “unfinished”, even when the edge case (as such) has limited to no impact on the final outcome (think of the Pareto rule).
2. Language is a powerful tool and choosing the wrong word (i.e. “perfect” vs “excellent”) can make you strive for an outcome that is unattainable or simply not realistic given the constraint we are inevitably subject to.

In a nutshell, perfection prevents you from making valuable tradeoffs and therefore being able to say “this is good enough” when it actually is.

If we want a realistic definition of excellence then, we could say that excellence is about “being better than the rest”.

Great, then the question becomes: what is this “rest” we are comparing our work (or ourselves) with? Let’s see a few ideas.

1. Our past selves

Doing something better than we did before doesn’t sound necessarily like excellence. We tend to compare our outcomes to other people’s, though I’d argue that the first step to create something excellent is to improve ourselves.

A few questions you can ask yourself that might guide you towards a state of personal excellence:

• What is something similar to what I’m working on that really made a great impression on me? What makes it so good in my eyes?
• What is one tool or piece of knowledge that would help me understand better the problem I’m solving or get closer to the solution I’m implementing?
• Who is someone (person, team, company) I admire for their work? How can I connect with them and get guidance in some shape or form?
• Who is someone (person, team, company) that works in a mediocre way and I better disconnect from?

2. The competition

Whether we feel good about the way we work and the people we surround ourselves with, often we tend to compare our work with the ones others did, especially if there is a direct business benefit in offering a better solution than others do.

While this can be a great push for winning clients or selling more, it can often reduce our effort to meeting the arbitrary expectations of not yet validated ideas that come as requirements. Sentences like “the competition has feature X, we need to be on par” or “that’s what everybody does” (or, heavens forbid, “that’s what Megacorp does”) are the driver of long stretches of effort to chase the illusion of perfection.

What can then drive a better outcome?

• Start by collecting as much data as you can, and pay attention to distinguishing between quantitive and qualitative. For instance, let’s imagine you’re building a digital product: a few user sessions can tell you a lot about your users’ behavior but they won’t make it up for statistical significance just because you run an A/B test. On the other hand, while they will not help you make a specific customer happy, tons of data can highlight frequent patterns and become the lighthouse for big decisions. Long story short, you will need both.
• Do take a look around for inspiration but be clear what you are trying to achieve: CoolNewApp might have a great way to show information on a map, but if that doesn’t serve in the direction of achieving your current goals, it’s a nice-to-have that you can consider later. Define your “good enough” before starting to work on the problem and have checkpoints on the way to see whether there’s evidence you’re still working on the right problem.
• If you really think there’s an application in your product/work for what you see in other products or someone else’s work, reach out to the people who built it and ask them questions. It’s not always possible, when it is people are usually happy to share their leanings and you’ll save time on figuring out the nitty gritty details once you know their rationale for the decisions they made.

3. Learn to know when to stop

Sometimes, the real excellence shows up in doing what you promised, on time and with a high level of quality. You can ride the extra mile only when you run all the miles before it, and often you don’t have to.

In fact, when you reach that magical place called “good enough”, you can direct any extra effort to:

• polish your work
• make it more efficient
• document it (for your future self and others)

Do (some of) these and you’ll get an excellent result.

Bonus: you want to be excellent? Sleep on it!

In many cultures, an idea exists that a night of sleep will bring you advice on what it is the right thing to do. While our ancestors might not have known why, research has shown us that sleep is a fundamental tool for our body and especially our brain to function at the highest level (with terrifying consequences when you don’t).

Though it’s indeed important to have a healthy lifestyle across the board (i.e. eat well, exercise, have a social life, etc), sleep might be the first thing for you to look after, in that it takes a relatively small effort to take control over it and it can yield gigantic benefits in a short amount of time.

My knowledge on the topic in a nutshell:

• Be consistent in your schedule, go to bed (and wake up) at the same time every day, even on the weekend
• Sleep in a dark, cold, and quiet room
• Invest in a great mattress and pillow
• When possible, keep a window open to prevent CO2 from accumulating in the room

You can read all about the science around sleep in the book “Why we sleep” by Matthew Walker, or watch one of his many interviews online.

The reason why I’m pointing these things out is that, in my experience, great sleep quality leads to great results. Resting properly and as often as you need will make you see things clearly and go for the best tradeoffs more likely than not, as well as giving you the energy you need to accomplish your goals.

TL;DR

Aiming at excellence is an approach that can take you and your work to great lengths. On the way to excellence, we risk to take the road to perfection, which is often a longer way that leads to an arbitrary unattainable level of quality through frustration and unreasonable efforts.

We can move towards excellence by improving ourselves and the way we work, learning from others, and knowing when to stop.

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