Life is hard when you’re a perfectionist. You’ll do something and then spend double the amount of time tweaking what you’ve done to get every minor detail right. Even the details no one else will notice. As a perfectionist in my heart, I’m super guilty of this.
But here’s the thing, for almost all bosses, in almost all cases, speed is a much higher priority than perfection.
Before I dive in, I need to clarify, this isn’t always the case. Every boss or client is different. But overwhelmingly, for businesses to thrive, they need to move quickly—and for the company’s purposes, the difference between “really good” and “perfect” is a difference that won’t affect any aspect of the business—so, your client/boss will almost always value the speed more.
In an ideal world, you’ll create the perfect work, and you’ll do it very quickly. But that perfect world rarely exists. Therefore, for the perfectionist, there is a trade-off. Quicker, but it won’t quite be perfect.
Training yourself to move faster—and thus sacrifice the quality—is the hard part for a perfectionist. One way to understand the importance of this, to help train yourself, is to think about it from the client’s or boss’s point of view, which is this:
“Every time any partner or employee like Morgan gives me work, I’ll have to change it around. That’s inevitable because no one can read my mind. So, with everything they deliver to me, I’ll have to tweak and change it. Therefore, there’s no point in them being on their own, in a cave, tweaking it endlessly, and wasting days when I’ll just have to re-do that myself. And their tweaks won’t even be what I want or need, precisely because they can’t read my mind.”
In other words, the way to think about it is this: remember the old software developer’s joke, about how you spend the first 80% of your time doing 80% of the work, and the next 80% of your time doing the final 20%? The is truth to that, and the real trick is to remember, that that half amounts to both everything moving twice as fast and that tweaking into perfection will happen, just alongside and with the participation of your client. That always leads to a result that will both make your client happier—since he participated in the tweaking—and twice as fast. So, it is a big win-win!
Viewed differently: perfectionism, far too often, isn’t truly about achieving perfection. It’s rarely about having high standards. More commonly, it’s about either fear (being scared you’ll be looked down on for handing in something less than awesome) or control (the emotional need to control as much as possible.) And both of these are more than anything else personal emotional issues that are important for mature past to become a truly great professional, and probably to become a truly great adult, as well.
