Hello! This will be the first in a series of short essays I will write to muse on different technical and philosophical subjects as they relate to product design, technology, and life in general.
why you should do a shoddy job
or, "when good enough is best"
March 2008 by Dev Kumar
studiokumarI am a perfectionist. While this may be a cute answer to an interviewer's question, "What is your greatest weakness?" it is actually a serious problem and not an accolade in disguise. Perfectionism is a compulsive obsession that is every bit as damaging and destructive as other personality problems like procrastination or inability to focus. (I have those problems, too, but that is the subject of another essay. They are certainly related.) I want all my shirts to face the same way in the closet and I want all my tools to be in the right drawers of my roll-away. Stickers and price tags enrage me. At the same time, I am kind of a slob. Piles of papers and wires and components always litter my desk. What gives?
In the late '80s, slick hardback books read by executives in business class were abuzz with a new Japanese management philosophy called
kaizen, or "continual improvement." Sounds great. Who doesn't want to improve, and improve all the time? But the key word here is CONTINUAL. Improvement comes as a continuous series of very small steps. Perfectionism is just the opposite. By becoming obsessed with a final result, perfectionism robs us of the moment. Perfectionism is punctuated improvement.
When I was a teenager, a good friend of mine was obsessed with having the perfect car. He was an archetypal fanboy, reading technical specifications, magazines, and chatting with other enthusiasts on automotive websites. As a perfectionist, he had it all planned out. He knew exactly what kind of car he was going to get. He could name every component in it and could recite all of their manufacturing histories. Man, it was gonna be a tricked out ride. He would wax it daily, and keep detailed records of its maintenance. When his tire budget permitted, he might smoke the tires or practice J-turns.
Did he end up getting his 300 horsepower turbocharged dragster? Of course not. He finally learned to drive when he was about 22, and the last time I drove with him he was a clueless motorist puttering around in a rusted-out car that would look perfectly at home among the "Ambassador" taxis in India. We drove around LA for several hours trying to find the rare SAE 50-weight oil that this heap would burn slightly less quickly than a less burly lubricant.
My friend was completely focused on his dream car, so he did not notice that he wasted years of his life in a automobile that sucked. Perfectionism leads us to accept significant compromises most of the time in the hope of future improvement. Continual improvement means that we accept small sacrifices all of the time in order to focus on the present. It would be awesome if I could find the will to shave every single day instead of having two- or three-day lapses followed by two hours in the bathroom.
In engineering, design, and business, perfectionism is particularly damaging. Speed of execution is typically critical to success, and obsessing about unimportant details destroys one of the most powerful design tools at your disposal: iteration. I believe that great ideas can spring fully-formed from a fertile mind, but also recognize that even the best concepts have some rough edges. You will never come up with a great product if you spend months focus-grouping, conceptualizing, simulating, and second-guessing yourself. It is much better to get your product or website or painting out there and polish it in the harsh reality of a competitive market. If you are fast enough, you might have completed two or three projects while your competition is still obsessing about their first. The lessons you learn in the real world are far more valuable than any focus group or simulation.
In college, friends would joke that "D" stands for "done." While we should certainly strive for excellence, they make a good point. An unfinished project that "has a lot of potential" is still just junk in the corner or cluttering your hard drive. It is a complete waste. The engineer in me wants to quantify, so I think 80% is about the right level of completion for any project. A B-minus. When you are 80% complete, 80% perfect, just get it out there. Then you can worry about the next big thing.
Clearly, this is easier said than done. I admire and envy those who can easily complete a task and move on to a new one.
As for me, I worry that the links in my blog entries are not highlighted properly. Or that the unjustified text layout looks sloppy and amateurish. How might it look at all screen sizes? How about the typefaces? Are they stylistically consistent? Do they fail over elegantly in legacy computer environments? Maybe I need to go back and make sure that I am using simple, declarative sentences free of the passive voice where possible?
These concerns, among others, are why this post has been sitting in an open editor window all afternoon, and not on my blog. Finally, I have decided that am not going to worry about any of this. I will hit the "publish" button now. That is the discipline.
Labels: 80%, completion, essay, perfectionist, productivity
