Perfection is the enemy of progress

For some reason we are obsessed with perfection at all levels in life really. The perfect score (at schools), the perfect body, the perfect looks, the perfect food, the perfect plan…

So yes, Winston is still very right. You don’t want perfection, you want it done.

Raise your hand if you struggle to start something because you believe you are no good at it? Being a public speech, the perfect powerpoint deck, a new role….

Yap, me too.

So why is perfection the enemy of progress?

As opposed to call it the pursuit of perfection, I like to think of the pursuit of improvement – e.g. like Kaizen. If you keep on trying to get everything perfect, you might loose the big picture and not get something done where the time is of essence.

I have brainwashed my 5 year old to refuse perfection. I haven’t been called at the school yet, but in essence, even as little kids we say things like: “practice makes perfect.” I told her, no, practice makes better and every day you should try to practice so you get better. Perfection is not the point. It’s the learning journey.

We are all born without being able to do anything other than cry. How do you learn something new? Well, you just go for it, you attempt to do it, you learn from what you did, you make some marginal improvements and you try again. If you get to hang up that you are not good at it you will never try and hence you will never be good at it.

I like to write, but am I really good at it? No. Do I enjoy it? Yes, so I keep on doing it and maybe at some point the words will start to flow a lot better. Do I care if I’m perfect at it? No.

I think my whole being is against perfection and in fact I love to enjoy the imperfect of everything around us. We are not even symetrical as human beings and that’s what makes us amazing!

But even I fall into the perfectionism trap, mainly at work. I remember seeing a powerpoint pack with all the boxes misaligned and different fonts all over the place. My OCD will kick in and say I need to align all those boxes. Does that actually need to be done? No.

The beauty is in the balance. How to identify it’s good enough to be delivered vs continue to try to improve it. This is where Agile is an amazing tool: what is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Get it out there, get feedback and then improve it.

Can you imagine if they’ve spent years and years finding the perfect mobile phone before they released it out there in the market? By the time it was out, it would be outdated and not relevant anymore. You need to keep on doing and trying and fail to get better. To even know where you are good at one must try. If you really want to improve a skill don’t worry if you’re good, just try every day until it comes more naturally to you. Some people might learn something faster than others, but it shouldn’t deter you from try.

Nothing like experimentation to drive progress. So many things were found out of mistakes in the pursuit of something else: Post-its I’m looking at you. Timing is more critical than perfection. Get it done and see what happens. Try something new and see how you feel about it.

And to me the most important is stop talking and start doing. I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve had about: “we need to do this”, many meetings go on and nobody has even started to do anything! Do, then talk about it. Try, see what happens, see where it leads you, then improve it once you have some feedback over what you found.

Just keep moving forward. It’s the journey that matters and what you find on the way.

But we’ve always done it like that….

This scenario is indeed quite common in all organizations. Some processes sneak in without any one challenging them or trying to understand and question: why?
Sometime we should keep the child inside us and question more often when it doesn’t make sense. Don’t always assume the processes are correct, just because someone thought about them before.
If they don’t make sense to you, or if you don’t understand them, ask why.
This is quite a common mistake during knowledge transfer: you just click this button, then print this paper and deliver to this person. After a couple of years (or just a few weeks), it doesn’t make any sense and it makes the process of redesign way harder because no one seems to know what they are doing, they just do what they were told to. Sounds familiar? 🙂