A CASE AGAINST PERFECTIONISM

We all know people who are?perfectionist.?They want everything perfect (which is a tall order in an imperfect world).?They fret over little details obsessively.?Often,?they?make themselves, and everyone around them, crazy.?They create stress and seldom reach the perfection that they so desperately seek.

Let me just make a small disclaimer here.?Quality of everything is important.?For a business it is?vitally??important.?You must provide a quality product or service to survive in the marketplace today.?Quality is remembered long past the enjoyment of cheap price is enjoyed.?Everything you do should be stamped with quality.?Just because we are not perfectionist is no excuse for any shoddy product or service.

So the real problem is when do you say, “Good enough, seldom is.”?And when do you say, “Good enough is good enough.”

The answer to this question I found recently from a book review by?Derek Sivers .?In reviewing the book?Art and Fear?by David Bayles and Ted Oland, Sivers wrote the following quote:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

I contacted Ted Orland to find out the source of the research and he told me that it was a photography teacher that used it as a lesson for his class.?Ted took a little license and changed it to a ceramics class and a research project.?But the point is still a penetrating insight.

There is a learning curve.?We learn by doing.?As a corporate Sales Trainer, I remember, salespeople who thought they couldn’t go out and sell until they knew everything.?They would dance around everything.?Spend time learning the ins and outs of their product, making sure they were experts before ever calling a prospect.?Most of those types of sales people never made it in their careers.?Others were comfortable not knowing all the answers, but knowing where to get them.?The were willing to learn the process on the job, in the trenches, in front of prospects.?They built careers.

We learn through?experimentation.?We do something, evaluate our performance, then?improve.?The cycle repeats itself, we?do it again, evaluate again, improve again.?And the cycle repeats itself again.

Imagine the first time you tried to write it came out perfect.?You would have lost so many important lessons that your failures provided.?When you learned to walk it took many tries until you became proficient.?Riding a bicycle was no different.?Any athletics or art that you?excel?in, was a process when you started.?Your chosen field took time to become competent.?A?foreign?language takes a concerted effort with many?gaffes?to become fluent.?Many relationship challenges happen until we are finally able to created meaningful and lasting relationships.

All of life is made up of doing things poorly and through effort, and?tenacity?improving.?Which brings us full circle.?We all grew up thinking “Something worth doing is worth doing right.”?While that is true.?It is also true that “Something worth doing is worth doing poorly.”

If we take ourselves off the hook on the perfectionism, we can?embrace experimentation.?We will find things that we are good and enjoy, and then improve.?Our quality of experience will come from our quantity of experience.?And just maybe, as we improve we will at times experience perfection with joy and wonder.