Perfection is the Enemy of Excellence

Perfectionism is always a favorite topic when I give a presentation, evoking a blizzard of questions about what it is, where it comes from, how to overcome it and why women especially seem to over-invest their energy in the agonizing effort to be perfect.

What’s clear to me is that striving to be perfect elicits a painfully high cost. It creates stress for us and for others, brands us as a small-picture thinkers, makes it tough to delegate and can cause us to become chronically risk-averse.

So why is perfectionism so tough to let go of?

The big stumbling block seems to be the fear that loosening our grip and relentless focus on getting the details right will translate into sloppy performance and poor execution.

This fear was made clear by an arresting question I got while delivering a virtual Master Class for my friend Marcio Silva with Mulheres no Topo in Sao Paulo Brazil last week. One of the participants, Ludmila Coelho, raised her virtual hand asked:

Isn’t perfectionism the same thing as striving for excellence?

And what’s the difference between perfection and excellence?

Now, when I’m confronted by an interesting question, my first thought is often, who should I ask? In this case the answer was obvious: the guru of excellence, Tom Peters.

Tom has been writing, researching and speaking about excellence since his 1982 blockbuster In Search of Excellence, co-authored with Robert Waterman, showed the world that business books could be bestsellers.

He followed it with A Passion for Excellence, with Nancy Austin in 1985 and just kept on going. Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism, which sits on my desk as I write, was just published in April.

In other words, Tom is the go-to person on the subject. And he nailed it in his swift email response:

Dear Sally:

· Perfection is a typo-free strategic plan presented by McKinsey to a client.

· Excellence is The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder ( I once flew from San Francisco to Madrid and back in 48 hours for the sole purpose of seeing this Bruegel hanging at the Prado.)

· Perfection is a nurse standing at a patient’s bedside, eyes-on-screen, entering scads of required error-free data on to her/his tablet.

· Excellence is a nurse who effectively says “fuck the data” and spends three minutes soothing a patient, patting her or his hand, exuding human compassion to an elderly, very ill patient.

· Perfection is proceeding through the meeting agenda in a linear fashion and without a hitch.

· Excellence is a wobbly meeting that only gets through 60% of the agenda, but comes up with two or three highly creative ideas.

Tom

As these vivid examples make clear, excellence manifests a kind of caring that allows for spontaneity and passion while focusing firmly on what really matters. Excellence is big-picture. It’s connected to our larger purpose. It is, ultimately, a way of expressing love.

Perfectionism by contrast is rooted in fear: the fear that we are never enough. This fear spurs us to focus on our energies on checking all the boxes and rigorously avoiding even the possibility of mistakes. But in trying to make ourselves invulnerable to criticism, we come off not feeling quite real since our efforts are out of sync with our underlying conviction. This is why perfectionism is implicated in the imposter syndrome: we know we’re not perfect so when we try to show that we are we quite naturally feel like a bit of a fraud.

But all is not lost, for perfectionists do understand something very important: that details matter. It’s just that perfectionists often focus on a lot of unimportant details in their (I should say our) commitment to dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s.

Yet the details that count are those that show our care and our commitment: following up, responding promptly, answering thoughtfully, giving others our full attention, touching, looking, engaging the heart, being present now, inspiring and motivating others. Imagining a better future. Radiance. Beauty.

Tom clearly concurs as he followed his listicle with an urgent email relaying his favorite perfection-excellence story.

So I’m going to give the last word here to Tom.

“Rikyu was watching his son Sho-an as he swept and watered the garden path. ‘Not clean enough,’ said Rikyu, when Sho-an had finished his task, and bade him try again. After a weary hour, the son turned to Rikyu: ‘Father, there is nothing more to be done. The steps have been washed for the third time, the stone planters and the trees are well sprinkled with water, moss and lichens are shining with a fresh verdure; not a twig, not a leaf have I left on the ground.’ ‘Young fool,’ chided the tea-master, ‘that is not the way a garden path should be swept.’ Saying this, Rikyu stepped into the garden, shook a tree and scattered over the garden gold and crimson leaves, scraps of the brocade of autumn! What Rikyu demanded was not cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural also.”

—Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea

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