“Good Enough” is Enough

Why Overcoming Your Inner Perfectionist is Good for Business

After ten years of freelancing, I’ve finally reached a place where I can be comfortable with my achievements, even though I still see my shortcomings. Not only is it liberating to be OK with being “OK”; it’s actually essential to the growth and flourishing of a sustainable career.

Entrepreneurship and perfectionism go hand in hand….?

When you run your own business, it’s natural to want everything done to a very high standard. After all, you are responsible for the end product or service, and if you don’t impress your clients, they won’t come back or recommend you to others.

You have good reason to go the extra mile to build a reputation, and you’ll enjoy the work more if you take pride in it. But when there’s nobody else to tell you how good is “good enough”, it’s easy to find yourself bending over backwards to meet an unrealistic self-imposed ‘perfect’ standard — and burning out in the process.

You are your own worst critic

As a writer, I can spend hours agonizing over the opening or closing paragraph of a blog; sometimes longer than it takes to write and edit the main content. Coming from a background in academic philosophy, I am my own harshest critic when appraising my work for its strength of argument and watertight structure.

But I’ve learned through experience that these aren’t the things that matter to my clients if I’m pitching for a publication aimed at a non-academic audience. The time it would take to refine the structure to my inner critic’s requirements would render most writing jobs financially unviable, because the market I am working in does not demand this as part of the service.

Don’t promise the earth

Any entrepreneur competing for work in an overcrowded market wants to look better than the competition. But there’s no point promising the earth if delivering it will mean you have to work all weekend for a poor hourly rate and make yourself miserable in the process.

Even those of us lucky enough to enjoy our work still want work-life balance and good mental health to be the default; those ‘epic’ projects where we get really into it and pull an all-nighter should be the exception, not the rule.

Some opinions don’t matter

Of course, we all want to be able to say that whatever we do, we do it really well. But this needn’t mean all-round perfection — if indeed there is such a thing. It’s more about knowing who we’re doing it for, and what is important to that target audience.

Tara Mohr, author of Playing Big, reminds us that we do not have to incorporate every piece of feedback and criticism into our future work, but should instead consider who it came from, how important it is to serve that person’s needs, and at what point those needs might become fundamentally incompatible with our own. One of the lessons I’ve learned from a decade of freelancing is that this same principle can be applied to our own inner critic, which can sometimes stand in the way of simply getting a job done.

Know when good enough is enough

I’ve felt close to burnout many times in my career, and overcoming my own perfectionism has helped me to keep going when everything feels too much.

In many cases, the small details I’m worrying about don’t make any difference to my clients, and forcing myself to complete a job within a fixed timeframe has proven that the end result is not noticeably worse than if I’d slaved away at it for days.

This shift in mentality takes some getting used to; after all, your work will no longer be perfect. But learning how to recognize when it’s good enough is one of the best things I ever did for my business.

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Jenni Elbourne is a writer, charity founder and arts consultant based in London. She hosts Properly Freelance Podcast, in which honest freelancers share the realities of self-employed life. www.jennielbourne.wordpress.com