PERFECTION IS A USEFUL ILLUSION BY ANDRE FARINAZO

As someone who’s heavily yellow on the HBDI, planning has never been a strength of mine, but that’s never stopped me from trying. One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered when planning is the nagging idea that there is a “right” or “perfect” way to solve a problem.

The longer I work on my company and classwork, the more I realize anything can be improved given more time, thought, and resources. I don’t know what the upper limits to that potential improvement are, and I strongly suspect there aren’t any.

I often hear people saying, “nobody’s perfect” and that it’s toxic to strive for perfection, but I can’t help but ask why. In theory, everyone wants to make fewer mistakes, so I think calling it toxic only hints at a much more complex and deep idea.

It seems the pursuit of perfection, which I define as the purposeful reduction of errors I know I can avoid, is perhaps the most useful thing I can do. I also suspect it’s particularly useful to find out what I value, which is what I’ve been trying to use it for.

That doesn’t mean, however, that perfection can’t become an ideal that crushes me under its sheer weight, just that it’s meant to be a tool to aim my efforts–not something that can ever actually be reached.

That said, however difficult the struggle to find the right or perfect answer, I have yet to encounter a situation where it isn’t worth trying. :)