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Let “good enough” Be Enough
“Published” is better than “perfect
Who benefits from what’s never read?
It could be the height of hubris to think this article would benefit ten out of 100 readers but let’s pretend it will. If I were to make twenty tiny tweaks in an attempt to “perfect” it, maybe it would help one or two more people. That would be great but what if I didn’t post it at all because I couldn’t make it as good as I thought it needed to be? How many people would it benefit then?
I struggle less with perfectionism than I used to, partly because I recognized how it was paralyzing my creativity and productivity. I realized that I could not please everyone, least of all myself. There is a thin grey area between perfectionism and excellence and a thicker grey area between excellence and “good enough”. There is nothing that I do that needs to be perfect in the way that a flight checklist or surgery needs to be. Now that I am retired, there are far fewer tasks where even excellence is really required. That may change depending on what projects or activities I take on.
How does one define what constitutes “perfection” for any project or task? Who gets to set out these criteria when perfection is an illusion in any case? To what extent is perfectionism an excuse to procrastinate working on a project or avoiding it altogether?
