It is the story of a person who wants to make things well, wants to give its best, to avoid mistakes. When working on a project, might it be for work or personal, this person spends a great amount of time and energy to make sure everything is as it should be. And nothing wrong or incorrect must be done. This person is a perfectionist.
This person might be you. And i know it has been me. Today i am trying to avoid being this person.
Sure being a perfectionist allows to always deliver outstanding results. But what happens when you are not able to produce this outstanding result, because of lack of time, of lack of resources, of lack of knowledge? The answer is you don’t deliver: analysis paralysis.
If everything you produce has to always be perfect, I’m sorry to tell you that there are a lot of things you won’t be able to do. Simply because outside of the scholar system, there isn’t such a thing as perfection. And even if one person finds something perfect, the next person will have a completely different point of view on the matter and it will not be perfect.
How I became a perfectionist
There are times in our lives when we are more susceptible to be a perfectionist. And if i am writing this article it is because i recently caught myself being a perfectionist.
It happened gradually. A bit more than a year ago i was full of hope, eager to take on a new life. I wasn’t afraid of making mistakes. And mistakes I did. At first it was pretty good, my mistakes were compensated by the progress I was doing. And even if i did some mistakes, I could always try to correct them later if necessary. A sort of life size trial and error.
The difficulties came when the progress feedback stopped coming. I was still doing the same effort. But something the amount of failure grew and i couldn’t figure out why. No problem, I’ll work a little bit harder to make things better and avoid a few mistakes. And still i faced unexpected failures. So again i tried harder, making sure i was avoid all the mistakes i could avoid… and still more failures… and so loop began.
It began so important that I was so afraid of more work leading to more failure, that i lost hope and i stopped trying. It’s difficult place to be when everything you try just ends up in failure. Spending hours, days or even weeks on writing the perfect letter… only to be rejected the same way you’ve been rejected hundreds of time before.
Being unable to achieve my perfectionistic hopes, i stopped trying.
Getting rid of perfectionism
The thing about humans, is that by default we are welcoming and willing to help others if we can. And even more, we like helping others, it makes us feel useful and important.
I know that if i get a message with a couple typos i don’t really mind. What maters is the person behind the message. And I know that if 100 people send me a message to tell me the same thing, all 100 messages will actually be different… because there isn’t a perfect way of saying it.
When i realized i was starting to be paralyzed by perfectionism, I remembered how things were going a year before, when i dared to do mistakes, when I dared to be the person who did stuff without double guessing my every thought and move.
So I tried sending an imperfect message. And it was liberating.
I can’t decide on how the person on the other side is going to receive my communication. The receiver might be having a bad day or even a bad month. The receiver might have lost a loved one. The receiver might just have been yelled at by his boss and want to release the pressure by replying to my message. The thing is with such a reply you have given me crucial information: that i don’t want to be working with you, at least for now. Because the receiver has the right be imperfect as well. But i won’t let his mistakes impact me.
I don’t need to be perfect, and if i do it imperfectly i will have more results than if i don’t do it perfectly.
Good enough
Today I try to do something imperfect as often as I think about it.
Because it only needs to be good enough to get the job done.
And this is my challenge to you: do something imperfect today. That thing you have been putting off for a few days, try to do it imperfectly. Be conscious you are doing mistakes, but allow yourself to accept them.
Be imperfect.
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