Understand once and for all that perfection doesn't exist!
Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
91–100 of 134 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
#92I had kids.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
#93I think I have a strange answer: The only things that work for me are spite and a desire to not be a dick. I will not overcome perfectionism for my own sake, but wanting to model handling mistakes gracefully for junior colleagues/kids enables me to do it.
If I don't mess up, I can't fix it, and the world could really use more people who are willing to admit fault and work to repair mistakes. We all make them; I find lots of people with perfectionistic tendencies (myself included) hold ourselves to a much higher standard than others, so I just created a new impossible standard to meet that makes it possible to mess up, admit it, and move on. (Now the impossible standard is that I don't possess infinite grace about my mistakes, but...)
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
#94In Brazil we have a saying: done is better than perfect (o feito é melhor que o perfeito). In terms of code, I write code that works and polish it later.
You see, my boss uses this exact quote almost everyday (brazilian as well), and now several teams have plenty of debt, missing patterns, stuff like this. These days people see this quote more like "something is better than nothing at all", and here we are, never satisfied with the engineering practices, always delivering something instead of delivering something good. It takes a cultural revamp to value good code fro…
Absolutely, do not use this as excuse to do something half-assed, but to create a prototype over a perfect plan / idea.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
#95I had to do something really complex with many pieces out of my control and I realized there is no way to deliver but to be pragmatic.
I also lived in an industrial farm while doing that project and I noticed many areas are incomplete and imperfect yet the farm is operational. It gave me a good metaphor on why large complex spaces will surely have imperfections everywhere, and it's okay.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
#96Psychotherapy (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 » (this one is about ACT)
Then lots of reading and experimenting. Related thread (and great article from a fellow perfectionist) « Unlearning Perfectionism » https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30223559
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
#97It depends on who is the boss/customer.
This is a multidimensional problem, and the only way out is to find concrete measurable aspects. Focusing on things you can measure is important as "perfect" is a limit point which may not be achievable, and you my have hidden problems that don't get revealed.
My personal strategy is to make forward process on execution to get to some E2E point, and then the goal is how to drive optimization. The customer is there to help you understand what is good enough.
It's important to master this skill because it is easy to get stuck in the mud, and getting something perfect now may not be so great later on.
I struggle with it as well, and I've suffered other peoples' definitions of "good enough". However, that suffering allowed me to retire early and now I'm suffering myself as the customer. I'm a cruel customer...
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
#98Running my own business, I have fallen into this trap time and time again. What I’ve come to realize is that just because you care, doesn’t mean someone else cares. I’ve spent hours optimizing features, updating my website, etc, all for little to no return. If I took a step back and asked myself a few questions, I could avoid wasting time.
Does doing x save you time later?
Does doing x make you significantly more happy?
Will you regret spending time on x?
Does doing x help others?
Are there things more important than x that need to be done now?
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
#99Few realizations that helped me:
* Consistency is more important than perfectionism
* Perfectionism doesn't matter in most of the fields. Just being close to perfect is enough.
Re: Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism?
#100Psychotherapy (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.