Perfection? I think I will pass . . .
When you are doing a task, do you feel if it doesn’t get done “right”, you aren’t going to do it at all? What does doing it “right” look like? Is it perfection? Diligent effort over a period of time will produce a high degree of effectiveness, not perfection.
Perfection is: “an exemplification of supreme excellence or an unsurpassable degree of accuracy or excellence”.
I was thinking about this and how easy it is to be in one extreme or another on this matter. One extreme is putting in a half-hearted effort over a long period of time and having only marginal results. Never approaching anything close to what would be considered perfection.
The other extreme is what I want to focus on, putting in so much time into a project because you want to get as close to perfect as you can. This results in one of two things.
- Accomplishing very little, but what you do is as close to perfect as you can get.
- Not starting anything because you know you will not have the time to do it to your level of perfection.
The end result is the same, being ineffective and having minimal influence in those things you do. I work at a church where we have an awesome music department, a great T.V. department, and a strong web presence. I oversee our IT area, along with supporting over 30 websites with a skeleton staff. Our IT staff has shrunk over the past few years and we have lost some good web programmers. We have taken over the support of more of our Outreach ministry websites from volunteers who develop in their own favorite flavor of code. In order for us to accomplish this, we had to change the way we do business. We standardized on developing all our sites in Joomla, realizing we needed to be as effective as we could with the limited resources we had. It was a complete shift in traditional thinking, but it has worked out.
Below is a chart of what perfection should look like. As a co-worker of mine, Matt Leonetti said, “If it passes the mom test, it is good enough”. What does that mean? For those perfectionist out there it is this: If your mom can’t tell the difference between the product (music, video, or web) when you get to the “Sweet Spot”, or when it is done to your level of perfection, it passes.
Perfection robs you of being effective.
Perfection robs you of having an impact.
I am certainly not advocating grinding out shoddy work, but I am suggesting that you aim squarely at the “Sweet Spot” that produces maximum results without wasting time trying to gain a more perfect result, that for the most part, no one would notice. Ask yourself if you can relax your standards to get more accomplished, which in effect, increases your overall effectiveness.
I encourage you strive to be as effective as you can by putting in a consistent diligent effort at all you do, knowing that unfinished work benefits no one. Take the time to look at what you do differently and maximize your results without sacrificing the quality of your work.