The paradox of imperfection
Perfectionism is popular among middle managers, and many CEOs too. Just as teenagers compete to see who can walk over the edge of a cliff, so managers measure up: “You’re only 95% of perfect, and I’m 99.5%.” No wonder some people get burned out at these “Olympics”. After all, every extra percentage of perfection comes at an exponentially increasing cost. I used to be like that myself, and later observed this phenomenon in my subordinates and colleagues.
Entrepreneurs intuitively know all this, and so instead of perfectionism they profess the principle: “Good enough is good enough”. The manager inhabits an artificial greenhouse environment, where the connection with reality is indirect, and therefore responsibility for mistakes can be avoided. The habitat of the entrepreneur is a wild market, where there is no connivance or mercy. Business has to fight every day for survival, with no guarantee of reward for efforts. Like the cheetah, the entrepreneur values his limited resource, which may not be enough for the next hunt. Therefore, his goal is not the form, but the pure functionality of the product, the process, and the team. If the mechanism roars, rattles and smokes, but it moves, it is already good.
Besides perfectionism is bad for people’s health and unacceptably expensive for business, there is another argument against it. Ido Portal, the world’s #1 human movement expert, suggested in an interview, “I believe in power of non-complete process, like making this table, but leaving something undone, not perfecting the product. Why? Because it offers some kind of dynamic nature of evolution that naturally unravels from it. Almost like sometimes I do it, I count reps and I’ll only count to 9, because it tends to leave people in the count and it keeps going instead of giving them the 10”.
What if imperfection is fundamental to the existence and development of not just business, but Life in general?
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
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