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Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

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111–120 of 134 posts

Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

#111
One method I’ve found: realizing that something I don’t like may simply be ripped out in its entirety at some point, and therefore I may be wasting time obsessing over its minor details right now. (And deleting hundreds of lines of an awful module later is a much better feeling than any amount of optimization beforehand.)

Also, I found that I tend to perfect only the things that I work on alone. As soon as anyone else is involved, you have to start worrying about things like not making difficult merges, and most perfections fall into the category of “PITA merge”. That grand 50,000-line code-reformatting that someone did will not really help, it will just come up again and again across 4 branches that they didn’t know existed, as each person trips over the same things. And I guarantee there is at least one tiny bug in that reformat somewhere. So don’t do it; keep things as close to what they were before as possible, pretty or not, for as long as it lives, unless you can be absolutely sure that there won’t be other branches out there.

Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

#112
Deadlines: perfectionism isn't an issue in itself, spending eternity achieving it, is. Pick a milestone (e.g. MVP of feature X) and a due date. Once you hit that milestone promptly, pick another and repeat.

On a different note, perfectionism can be a symptom of procrastination. It requires much less will power to fine tune an existing thing, than it is to start something new or work through early steps. If this is the case, then apply the usual anti-procrastination techniques: vow to put X minutes a day into a project in order to make it a habit and get the ball rolling; identify obstacles that are creating friction; re-think the design and simplify; breakdown the task to make it less intimidating; etc.

Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

#114
No, trying to be perfectism is a long term game. Anything else will fail eventually. They eventually fail because noone can handle/pay big enough tech debts.

It was my experience at most of my tech company where people rushed features with full of tech debt implementation.

Like a wise man said: think clearly before any action.

Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

#116
The thing is that perfectionism isn't smart. Instead, it's a mental illness called OCD.

It's also literally impossible to achieve perfection since you only approach the epsilon distance to perfection.

That's why smart people stay away from perfectionism, because wanting perfection is a mental illness.

Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

#117
post #18

I keep coming back to the old Reid Hoffman quote: "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped". A useful thing to remember is that you are the ONLY person that knows how beautiful the thing you were planning to build was going to be. What you've actually built is always going to be disappointing compa…

this is a terrible philosophy, and one of the reasons everything sucks

Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

#118
post #18

I keep coming back to the old Reid Hoffman quote: "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped". A useful thing to remember is that you are the ONLY person that knows how beautiful the thing you were planning to build was going to be. What you've actually built is always going to be disappointing compa…

> I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped".

That is easy to say as marketing first personality with access to money. In this case shipping anything is critical and you can fix it later.

As a bootstrapped technologist product quality is all you’ve got. If the product isn’t revolutionary then nobody cares and you won’t change their opinion. So, in this case you need to get it mostly right, because you won’t get a second chance at a first impression.

Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

#119
post #18

I keep coming back to the old Reid Hoffman quote: "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped". A useful thing to remember is that you are the ONLY person that knows how beautiful the thing you were planning to build was going to be. What you've actually built is always going to be disappointing compa…

> I keep coming back to the old Reid Hoffman quote: "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped".

Unfortunately, I believe that this philosophy is largely behind our current software being the shit it is. Seemingly basic features in absolutely fundamental softwares are broken or majorly suck (e.g. python package management, Intellisense for C++ in Visual Studio) and everyone is fine with it. One can only hope that releasing shit is the best we can reasonably accomplish and the alternative reality, where humanity takes time to release software products of reasonable quality, is just a pipe dream (because people are actually not capable of working that hard).

Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?

#120
post #100

Psychotherapy (esp. CBT - cognitive behavioral therapy - and ACT - acceptance commitment therapy) has been very helpful to me to understand how this works. The fun part has been observing how a professional operates and the effects it can have on someone. So I jumped right into psychology studies. It’s fascinating. It helped me understand my behavior further. There are good introductory books such as « Happiness Trap…

"How did you deal with perfectionism?" "Well, I started therapy but that wasn't good enough so I became a psychologist and I'm looking for the ultimate solution for it" Jokes aside, a better understanding of the need for time- and budget-limited solutions, as well as the realization of the maladaptive social origins of this issue have helped me control my perfectionism to an adequate degree.

Haha yeah, the joke’s not completely out of touch.

Fortunately it lead to a « good enough » understanding and mitigation state in my case. Quite similar to yours it seems!

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