81–90 of 104 posts
1. Make sure to find a launch customer. It’s easy to get stuck in endless trade studies without a real customer. Real customers bring real constraints that make decisions easier.
2. Focus on improving upon the baseline rather than achieving perfection. It’s still important to ask if the improvement is big enough to warrant the investment, but don’t get trapped into rejecting better solutions simply because they aren’t perfect solutions.
To share a contrarian view, what I have always observed is that if an organization has an ingrained culture of 80-20, then by the time something percolates 3-4 hand offs, the org half-asses the execution and more often than not fails. Organizations that can execute even somewhat more consistently instead run rings around and completely destroy the 80-20 organization over time and people lose their jobs. The secret is…
(I'm actually pitching the reverse situation at work. People keep chasing big wins to improve our system and then taking forever to deliver half of what they suggested at the start. Especially where performance is concerned. Meanwhile I'm knocking out little gains that are 20% of what they're chasing but doing it every fortnight to a month. Six months of 2% a week is 40% overall, and that would beat anything these jokers have delivered in four years.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most important aspect for me is in setting reasonable, concrete benchmarks that you can self-assess. Although good teaching and mentoring can be helpful, external opinion is also the source of many bad benchmarks - all too often nobody will be there to give advice more specific than "this is good, that is bad". To get better benchmarks, you have to do some philosophy to set up principles that you can judge yourse…
I like the idea: do you have any examples of it in practice?
But if I decide on particular concepts of good for this story, suddenly the path becomes clarified. And so I might select a theme to explore, a word or a phrase like "sunshine on a cloudy day", and then develop the basis of the story by making the contents abductively(as in abductive reasoning) similar to that theme - by inventing characters, settings and plot devices that would suggest similar ideas and then seeing how I could make them work together. As I add more, additional themes and principles might come up and I would navigate their use by looking for ways in which they are compatible with the primary theme. If there are contradictions between two themes, then I will have to resolve them or else drop exploration in that direction.
And you can see that there is a lot of work that would go into developing the story from a set of themes into a finished narrative, but it is also not work that would go in circles; there is a start and end to it, a point at which it definitely communicates the theme, and does so efficiently. The rest is a matter of adding some polish, smoothing out the particulars of the telling. It would only grow unbounded and become a truly "perfectionist" endeavor if I allowed too many contradictory elements to slip in and create problems, or burdened myself with too many technical constraints like those found in a top 10 or "do's and don'ts" list of quick-fixes. That advice can solve particular problems, but it comes after having a good foundation.
What spec you need is based on the goal. You can build cars using different specs and you may achieve a luxury car or an every sedan and both have "succeeded" if they meet their specs and sell to their respective markets
The most apt description I have come across of perfectionism is that it stems from some unresolved trauma that led to a fear of not being accepted and resulting lack of confidence.
I know that you didn't exactly invent the term unresolved trauma, BUT... As a person with a lot of unresolved trauma (and perfectionism issues), I hate the term "unresolved trauma". I've been working hard with a therapist and a psychologist for years, and I've made a ton of progress, but my trauma will never be truly resolved. Every few years some new facet of damage will pop up that I won't expect and will have to w…
I've even seen therapists who claimed that I could completely 'heal'. But that's a perfectionist attitude itself, which had me banging my head against the wall for too long.
I think the truth is far closer to 'able to live a satisfying life in spite of'
I had a professor once that said he found his most professionally successful students weren’t the ones who got A’s but the B students and he calked it up to the notion that the B students were better able to know where the maximum return on their invested effort was where as the A student invested whatever it took to get the A even if the incremental effort required wasn’t proportional to the incremental benefit of t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or being required to do something really important, but failing and suffering/seeing bad things happen in part because they or someone they depended on was unprepared (even if knowing how to be prepared, or being prepared was not really realistic in the circumstance). It can come from something as simple as the family losing their income and having serious problems due to economic issues, to a parent dying, or a majo…
> Over preparing/over doing it to the point where most would call it ‘perfectionism’ has saved my ass many times, because it meant when I got put in a situation that turned out to be much harder or scarier than I had imagined or knew was possible, I actually had the bare minimum necessary there to pull it off or get out of the situation successfully. That bit really resonated with me. Having a fixed mindset in certai…
There are a whole class of issues, including PTSD, Anxiety, Depression (and related or semi-related stuff like perfectionism), that are not so much that the behavior or feeling is bad or wrong in any absolute sense - it’s just not useful or appropriate in the current environment and it is causing distress and life problems because of it. There are plenty of life circumstances where any of those states could be appropriate and would help the person. PTSD in the checkout line at the grocery store is clearly not one of them.
More nuanced research over time seems to be discovering it’s sometimes less about ‘smash the symptoms with a hammer forever’ (heavy medication) and sometimes it’s more about unblocking whatever is stuck that is stopping the person from learning and adjusting appropriately to what IS actually happening, and process whatever was going on before, so they can get out of the ‘stuck’ bad state.
This does include medication, among other things sometimes. Sometimes it’s also changing environment, removing bad influences/people, living support, etc.
Definitely not applicable to everyone. But applicable to a surprising number of cases.
Superb article. One thing though, it's difficult to reconciliate job markets / interview tests with not being a perfectionnist to an extent. Hopefully not a crippling but a mature for of skillfulness.
The most apt description I have come across of perfectionism is that it stems from some unresolved trauma that led to a fear of not being accepted and resulting lack of confidence.
I know that you didn't exactly invent the term unresolved trauma, BUT... As a person with a lot of unresolved trauma (and perfectionism issues), I hate the term "unresolved trauma". I've been working hard with a therapist and a psychologist for years, and I've made a ton of progress, but my trauma will never be truly resolved. Every few years some new facet of damage will pop up that I won't expect and will have to w…
Kudos to you for identifying that for yourself and trying to distance from it!