Do you have admirably-high standards and an unshakeable will to achieve those standards? Or do you suffer from crippling perfectionism? If you settle for nothing but home runs, you may never get on base. If your perfectionism prevents you from ‘shipping the product’, who benefits? Zo Rachel and Bill Whittle find this view also bleeds over into governance — both by the politicians and the voters.
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11 replies on “Perfectionism Creates Winners and Destroys Dreams: Master Your Drive to Get It Right”
Exactly. Aim high, so that when you miss, you miss high. You’ll rarely hit the target. But if you don’t aim high, everything will hit low.
If you’re not making mistakes, you’re probably not doing anything. This is what I’ve heard from the best two bosses I’ve had. It wasn’t to excuse mistakes, per se. It was to re-assure the employee who makes few mistakes that making them is inevitable at some point, and not to beat yourself up too much over making them if it’s not a pattern.
The thing to aim for is not perfection but rather excellence.
Dunning-Kruger Effect: The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the coastline of ignorance.
A very thoughtful, meaningful and encouraging segment. Thank you for a lesson well-taught.
Of course there is an opposite end of the spectrum of perfection being the enemy of the good which is not caring enough about the result and just getting something done.
One of the best lessons I got early in my career was from an older VP of Mfg, who was very concerned about getting product out the door. So we were rushing one day to get things done and I was, of course, proud of our efforts. He called me aside, I thought to give me accolades, but it was to chastise me. (I also learned to praise in public, chastise in private from him). He then asked me a question which I have never forgotten.
If you don’t have time to do it right, when are you going to find the time to do it over?
This was the mid 80s and he may have gotten it from a 5-minute manager booklet, but it is a truism. You can rush and put out a lot of product, but if it’s crappy product your customers will go somewhere else next time. True of pretty much any industry.
There must me a minimum level of acceptableness. The thing that, as Bill pointed out, keeps the average high enough to keep you in business.
Ha!, my Dad used to say that too! His version was “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time when are you going to get time to do it over?”
Another “Dadism” and until you brought it up here I always thought it was a gem of his own wisdom but …
The companies my dad worked for where always having retreats, seminars, and merit vacations doing all sorts of company related stuff. From Dale Carnegie courses to Jamaican top performer’s trips.
It may very well be that Dad heard that expression at one of them, or that it was in a training booklet though it is no less valid if so.
It’s one of those ideas that just works and whether from a booklet or not I’m glad he passed it on to me.
My dad’s favorite was K.I.S.S. => Keep It Simple, Stupid.
That one works very well, too.
I’m sure we’ve all know people who use perfection as the enemy of good …
I once knew a guy, a fairly lazy and slovenly individual, who would not even attempt to do something unless conditions, tools, circumstances, etc. were absolutely perfect. It wasn’t that he wanted to achieve perfection, it was that he used the lack of perfection as an excuse to not even try.
It’s funny that Bill would use an example involving pheasant hunting. My dad was a crack shot with a shotgun too. He would go to South Dakota hunting pheasants with some of his buddies every year. They insisted he limit himself to three cartridges every day. Because they knew that if he pulled the trigger a pheasant was coming down and to be sporting and fair to everyone else they asked him rather insistently to only carry three shells. Dad’s friends knew that he could knock down a pheasant before most of them could get a gun to their shoulder. The limit was 3 pheasants per person per day so …
Dad didn’t take only the “perfect” shots. He took the shots that no one else thought were possible and got his limit of birds anyway. One shot, one bird in the game bag. Once that was done he put his gun up and handled the dogs for everyone else. Oh, and BTW, he did this with a 20 gauge too, while everyone else shot a 12 gauge.
The fact that Dad agreed to do things this way mightily impressed all his friends and only enhanced his reputation.
The point here is that if you really are really good, you don’t use that to hog all the action or humiliate your team mates. You use it to achieve the goals of the group and amplify the outcome for everyone and in doing so you enhance, not diminish, your own reputation far past the point of your own expertise.
Dad was as good with people as he was with a pheasant gun and he taught me a lot of “people lessons”. I needed those lessons badly because I’m not at all a “people person” like Dad. I still apply those lessons, when I want to, but I’m not at all like Dad in that regard. The people in question have to be worth the effort and my bar for that standard is a lot higher than Dad’s was.
Even so those lessons were very valuable because many times using the skills Dad taught me have increased or protected my position in a situation. Working with underling employees is a good example of where you might think someone is a total nincompoop but still manage to eek out the very best from them regardless of their natural tendency to mess up.
So whatever you do, don’t use perfection as an excuse not to try and try not to let your own perceived excellence (the Dunning-Kruger effect) get in the way of the mission. Get the job done first and foremost.
In the Marines we called this being “mission oriented” . One of the many unofficial mottos of the Marine Corps is “Adapt, Improvise, Overcome” which should tell you what the Marines think of using perfection as an excuse to not even try.
Great story, and that closing paragraph had me going to YouTube to watch some Heartbreak Ridge clips…
Funny thing about “Adapt, Improvise, Overcome” … I’m not sure if the movie or the motto came first. I remember other people and myself in the Corps using that expression, I just can’t remember if it was before or after Clint Eastwood said it in Heartbreak Ridge. I think it was before but I’m not 100% certain.
Lots of things are like that in the Marines. The Marine Corps tends to adopt what works and that adoption isn’t always a matter of record. Very often it’s not condoned in official doctrine either 😉
I.E. take the backronym ‘POG’. In my day the word was “pogue”, which is an insult dating back to sometime prior to WWI. It means someone useless, slothful and lazy of irredeemable character and questionable morals. What in modern text vernacular would be called a “POS”. You hear the word “pogue” applied in Full Metal Jacket when “Payback” insults one of the other Marines right before the attack on their wire. “Pogey bait” is anything that might attract a pogue, like a candy vending machine, cheap booze or a two dollah woman of ill repute …
But now it has morphed into ‘POG’, still pronounced the same way, which is “pohg” but it means “Person Other than Grunt”. It cracks me up that there’s a point in there somewhere wherein that changed and I can date a guy’s service by which meaning he ascribes to that word.
The old meaning is still around too, just not in as common use as it once was. A buddy of mine has a head of department where he works that is a mix of active and retired Marines and Sailors. The guy has the same first name as me. To keep us separate, when he’s not around, people refer to him as “Pogue ___” and me as “Stetson ___”. Each according to an obvious trait. The dude’s a pogue all the way through.
Seriously though, Marine Corps slang, jargon and profanities are a LOT of fun, it is a study in its own right. There are ways to curse at and humiliate a male troop in front of female troops and never, ever even come close to an actual four letter “dirty word”.
And vice verse too. I once heard a female DI breaking in raw female recruits and she had the girls crying and us guys rolling around on the ground laughing. She began with a serious-as-hell expression, her smoky cover pulled down over her face at a sharp angle …
“Ladies! There are 50 thousand miles of swingin’ Johnson on this base and every inch of it belongs to me …” It just kept getting better from there.
Language is an amazing thing.