Perfectionism can really kill
your progress.
I know because I'm a perfectionist
and it used to kill mine,
but in this video I want to share
actionable work I know you can do
to really ramp up your progress when
you're a perfectionist,
and to gain time without having to give
up on your devotion to excellence.
So let's go!
Now if you're a perfectionist it means
that you care about quality,
and that's a good thing, because I don't
want to turn out rubbish work
and neither do you! But devotion
to excellence
can easily disintegrate into what
people call
perfectionist paralysis, or
perfectionism paralysis,
and that's when you just can't get
things done, or you can't get them done
fast enough! And here are the problems
that that can cause.
It can cause you to miss deadlines. It
can cause you to get beaten to market.
And it can cause you to suffer the law
of diminishing returns, where you spend
exponentially more time trying to get
things perfect than you would have had
to have done
if you were just trying to get them to
good enough. And that means less time
for you, it
means less time to spend with your
friends, with your family, and less time
to spend doing
the joyful living activities that
we really look forward to.
If the car industry suffered with
perfectionist paralysis
we'd still be driving horses and carts!
and actually
I think that might even be a
quote! Is it?
Let me know in the comments if it is.
What we need more than perfection
is progress. In fact progress is what can
actually lead
to perfection, so here we're focused on
progress OVER perfection! One
great way to start moving towards
progress over perfection
when you're a perfectionist is to borrow
an idea from
software engineering a revolution in
software engineering called
Agile. Now the way we used to do software
is that from the point an idea was
created or a
requirement was first pointed out we
would do big requirements gathering to
fully understand
the requirement. Then we would
do big design,
then we would do big development,
followed by big testing followed by big
release and the
thing about that is that from
the point of having the idea
to releasing working software could be a
very long time, could even be
years, and in that time the customer's
requirement may have changed,
and in fact the market may have even
changed in such a way that makes the
software obsolete!
The idea of Agile is to get something
out quickly and put it out and test it
with its users, and find out what they
think about it,
and see how they use it, and see we can
learn from how they use it,
and then quickly produce an iterative
improvement on that,
and put that out for feedback, and see
how that works, and then do
an iterative improvement on that, and
keep frequently
producing iterative improvements
that remain
responsive to change. And so the first
action item that I'd like you to
take away
is to look at your life and work and
look at where you may be doing
something that's like big requirements,
big development,
etc, and see where you can adapt
a more Agile
mindset, where the idea is to get
something out
relatively quickly, get feedback and
produce the improvement
relatively quickly, more feedback more
improvement, and keep going
in that loop. And I do urge you to do
the action items
because as I say a lot in these videos,
information without action
will not produce change! Only information
that's followed up with action
will produce change. By the way if you're
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Another great way of creating progress
over perfection
is to use time boxes. Now imagine
for a moment
that you were a staff writer
on a newspaper
before the internet, when it was all
print newspapers, and
if you didn't get your story
to the editor
by the deadline, there isn't going to be
a front page tomorrow!
Now that's a hard deadline and when
you're in that kind of situation
you can't afford to get stuck in
perfectionist paralysis, you simply
have to start producing stuff, and there's
something about having a deadline
like that which focuses the mind and
gets movement, gets traction, gets us
over our
inertia. Now using a time box is
basically saying I'm going to
give myself
this much time to make progress on
what I'm doing
next, and at this point I'm stopping, and
that will help you focus your mind
the same way that it would focus the
writer's mind to have a writing deadline.
Yet another way of creating progress
over perfection
is to use what we call the 80-20 rule
or the Pareto
principle. I don't want to get
into the
economic history of this particular
principle, because it comes from
economics, but in
simple terms what it effectively
predicts is I
could probably get the key points
and the gist of five books in the same
amount of time
that it would take me to get a perfect
and deep understanding
of one book. Now that's not to say that's
how you should read books
because it depends how detailed and how
perfect your knowledge of the book
really does need to be, but this is about
the law of diminishing returns and the
fact that it
takes exponentially more time to do
something perfect
than it takes to do it good enough, so
the 80-20 rule
is about doing lots of good enough
rather than just one perfect. And so this
action point is
about identifying work in your life
where you can afford to be more good
enough and get
more done at a good enough level rather
than getting stuck
trying to produce one thing at a
perfect level. By the way one cause of
perfectionist paralysis is overthinking
and I've got a video about overthinking
up here. And yet another way of creating
progress over perfection
is to bring energy and enthusiasm to
your work. Now you might think,
surely it's not up to me whether I have
energy and enthusiasm about what I
do. Surely it's
a result of what the task is and
whether I like it. Well,
maybe to a point, but you can choose to
apply energy and enthusiasm.
If I take an example of something that I
don't particularly like doing: I don't
particularly like cleaning bathrooms!
But if somebody was going to pay me
a million dollars to
clean a bathroom, that would be the
cleanest bathroom on the planet, and I
would apply energy and enthusiasm
to getting that job done, so when
you choose to
apply energy and enthusiasm, you might
not like the task, but you might decide:
look, if it's
here to be done, I'm gonna do
this with energy and enthusiasm,
and I guarantee you some things will
happen. Number one is it will get
done, it will get done better, it will
get done quicker,
and you will actually have a better time
doing it, so bring energy and enthusiasm
to what you choose to do. Now admittedly
that can get tiring
so you can't do that for 24 hours a day,
so you're gonna need
regular breaks, so give yourself regular
brakes for refreshing
and renewal. To build on this watch this
video here next
where I get some tips from a CEO
on super productivity, or
if you've already watched that one,
then watch this one next.
This is steve wishing you health and
happiness and I'll see you next week.