Drew’s Marketing Minute post yesterday about Perfection Paralysis reminded me of the “Perfection is the Enemy of Excellence” post I wrote last summer. This message was shared with me via the FlyLady group, the largest Yahoo Group, coming in at 468,167 members today!
Perfection is the Enemy of Excellence
Excellence is willing to be wrong.
Perfection is being right.Excellence is risk.
Perfection is fear.Excellence is powerful.
Perfection is anger and frustration.Excellence is spontaneous.
Perfection is control.Excellence is accepting.
Perfection is judgment.Excellence is giving.
Perfection is taking.Excellence is confidence.
Perfection is doubt.Excellence is flowing.
Perfection is pressure.Excellence is journey.
Perfection is destination.
One way we try to help clients get past feelings/comments of “I’ll know it when I see it.” or “Can we combine a little of this one with a little of that one and then try it in bold too?” evaluations is to present a scorecard before they even evaluate the tactics.
1) The goal of this piece is: _______
2) The purpose is to: ____________
3) You asked for _______.
Then we present 2 or 3 options that meet the criteria and give our recommendation and why.
At first perfectionists can’t get comfortable with this. They feel that the opposite of doing it perfectly is doing it wrong. Not the case. It’s hard for us to get past that too. We want to keep working on it, working on it, working on it, to get it just right before showing a client for their feedback.
Getting it with 95% of everyone “loving it” right now is so much better than at 100% and the deadline and the opportunity is long past.
I don’t mean sloppy with typos, forgotten calls to action or broken links. I’m talking about the subjective “feeling” of a piece that can be so many different things to different people and difficult to put your finger on it.
How do you deal with the perfectionist urge?
