9 ms·

Being a perfectionist is an obstacle and how to beat it

116 points by frading 9y ago

frading 9y ago
Hello all, OP here. Don't hesitate to shoot any questions if you have any. This blog is mostly oriented towards filmmakers, but the concept of perfecting vs completing can apply just as well to web or technical endeavors.
- dootdootdoot 9y ago
  Have you struggled with perfectionism?
- grasshopperpurp 9y ago
  Thanks for posting this! Have you noticed a difference in people who are more accustomed to tapping into their flow state? Might be hard to get honest answers from people, I realize.
  - frading 9y ago
    Is tapping into your flow state a similar thing to "being in the zone"? In which case, it's hard to tell, since it is quite subconscious. I'd be tempted to say that being in the zone (if that's what you mean, let me know if not) happens to people who allow themselves to be less self-conscious, to be less disturbed by their own ego. In which case it may help them create better or more focused work. Although I realize I will probably give this a bit more thoughts, since that's interesting :)
    - grasshopperpurp 9y ago
      >Is tapping into your flow state a similar thing to "being in the zone"? Yep, exactly! I could see people who try to control things too much having a hard time getting into that state/zone and replacing it with a long cycle of fussing, but that's just how I imagine it might work. Thanks for the reply :^)
      - frading 9y ago
        That actually makes me think about 2 things now: 1. Being in the zone is good, but you may be functioning mostly on instinct, so the more experience you have, the better results you ll get. By that I mean that it s where that thing called craft helps you. You then have some techniques that you can rely on, and not only your gut feelings. 2. While being in the zone, it's still good to jump out of it and criticize your own work (as in you always have to be your best critic). It s almost as if criticizing yourself should be a reflex, part of your instinct. Sometimes I imagine someone commenting what I do and me trying to defend my work. If I can't defend it well, that means I better look into :) And I've mentioned that in another comment, but that applies to any work, whether it is considered creative or technical (knowing that there is a big overlap between those). As a person doing films and web app, my thinking is not very different from one to the other. (Thanks to you for making me think about this)
        davidjnelson 9y ago
        Flow states have been studied for a while now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) I feel this diagram sums it up very succinctly: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Challenge_vs_skill.svg/300px-Challenge_vs_skill.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Ch... Powerful stuff.
        frading 9y ago
        Excellent, thank you for those links. I will read them carefully.
        grasshopperpurp 9y ago
        >1. Being in the zone is good, but you may be functioning mostly on instinct, so the more experience you have, the better results you ll get. By that I mean that it s where that thing called craft helps you. You then have some techniques that you can rely on, and not only your gut feelings. Absolutely! The work of creating comes in the preparation - on one's self and craft. It's like a boxer or mixed martial artist. The time in the ring is the payoff for all the hard work. It's also the moment of judgement for that work and talent. 2 Chainz says, Hard work beats talent, and I tend to agree. >2. While being in the zone, it's still good to jump out of it and criticize your own work (as in you always have to be your best critic). It s almost as if criticizing yourself should be a reflex, part of your instinct. Sometimes I imagine someone commenting what I do and me trying to defend my work. If I can't defend it well, that means I better look into :) For writing poetry, I've settled on something similar. I do think the medium affects the approach. There are times when I will write a page and a half in flow state and read it to realize I only like two lines, and I'll still feel it was time well spent. In visual arts, you can't really do this. Most of the time, I write in a flow state until something breaks the rhythm - typically the emotional/mental impact, rather than meter. When the rhythm breaks, I rewrite the part that works (physically, not editing) and attempt to take a different turn from that point. So, in the process of creating, for writing anyway, I think the editor should hang around just enough to shoo the creator onto the right path. The cutting room is a different story. Really enjoy learning about the way you approach all this! Thanks! :^)
sitkack 9y ago
I have realized that my perfectionism is a mask for a fragile ego.
- frading 9y ago
  ha, that's not exactly what I mean in this post, I hope that's not what you would take away. (although you might just be sarcastic) What leads us to perfect our work (and prevents us from shipping) is hopefully not an ego problem. It's just that we might be too eager to keep improving it, instead of enjoying the current state. It's just like the belief that adding yet another feature to an app will solve everything.
  - curiousgal 9y ago
    http://explosm.net/comics/3433/ http://explosm.net/comics/3433/
    - soared 9y ago
      Also in song form! 998 good bricks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep6WVKEuk24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep6WVKEuk24
  - sitkack 9y ago
    I believe that behavior is in the minority of people. Perfectionism is much more complex affliction than simply striving for perfection.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
danieltillett 9y ago
99% of the perfectionists I have had the misfortune to work with are just slow or out of their depth and are using the term as an emotional crutch. How much nicer it is to tell yourself that you are a perfectionist than you are just not very good at whatever you are doing. The people that turn out near perfect work are usually the fastest and just get things done. It is a pity they are so rare.
- tomnipotent 9y ago
  Producing perfect work has nothing to do with perfectionism.
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    That is certainly true.
- bhnmmhmd 9y ago
  > How much nicer it is to tell yourself that you are a perfectionist than you are just not very good at whatever you are doing. By that logic, Steve Jobs should have never been good at what he was doing... I'm sorry, but this notion of yours is kinda insulting to all the perfectionists that had the misfortune of living in a world that doesn't appreciate them.
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    While it is debatable if Steve Jobs was a perfectionist, even if he were all it would mean is he is one of the 1%. It is more of a rant caused by me having to wait for the perfectionists to finish their third rate work so I can get on with mine :)
    - frading 9y ago
      I'm not even sure Steve Jobs claimed to be a perfectionist. "Doing great work" might be more how he would have phrased it, as well as iterating on it.
MattyRad 9y ago
This reminds me of the Cult of Done Manifesto, which focuses on doing and action. https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2ff13 https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...
- frading 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing, I didn't know that. I love the last point "Done is the engine of more"!
n1000 9y ago
I think there is a very thin line between perfectionism and being insecure. For instance, a person with ADHD is prone to doing a lot of errors and overlooking obvious issues. One coping mechanism is to triple check whatever you do. Some people may have developed this strategy early on in their childhood and never realized.
- frading 9y ago
  Triple checking is fine to me. I do it plenty of times. But it certainly depends on how long this would require and what it is spent on. For instance, I re-read my posts several times before publishing (and still wondering if I left typos). But for the design, I'm happy to leave things as a work in progress, knowing I will come back to it later. It's all about choosing your battles.
maldusiecle 9y ago
I'm really skeptical of this attitude. In a lot of fields I've seen people who commit themselves to "just getting it done." The result is that they do get a lot of work done: and it's bad, it's mediocre, it doesn't have value. On the other hand, one can easily think of creators who spent a long time on one work (maybe "too much" time), and the result was work of lasting value. Of course, this relates more to artistic work than technical matters. But I think it is damaging to act as if all work is equivalent to deadlined development work. Great things come from people being impractical.
- frading 9y ago
  > Great things come from people being impractical Yes, but in my experience this is more an exception, compared to the vast majority of people who never ship anything, because "it's not quite right yet". That's where the danger lies. And I think there are plenty of similarities between art and tech, regarding this. For a web app, it will have to be shared before growing in quality and becoming great. Github, Basecamp, Twitter all did that. It's always about having a first released being a kick ass half or a half ass product (Getting Real was phrasing it like that if I recall correctly). Same for a film. It might be released on a specific date to a wide audience, but it has gone through many iterations, discussed between dozens of people. And just getting it done does not mean that you have to stop everything once your deadline has passed. If there is more work that you want to add to improve it, do it. But at least you've shared it as an intermediary stage, and you and your work have probably both grown from that. And you can now give yourself another deadline.
  - stouset 9y ago
    As someone who spent the first ten years of their career desperately trying to salvage one steaming heap of technical debt and security disasters after another, I think we have wildly diverging opinions of the consequences of software development driven primarily by just trying to get something committed and out there. In my opinion, every single one of these companies was effectively a zombie: dead, but unaware of it.
    - 9y ago
f1mint 9y ago
http://www.f1mint.com/technology http://www.f1mint.com/technology
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lhnz 9y ago
Obsessing over minutiae won't help you to see the bigger picture. I think it's important to show your work early, in order that others can feedback. It's very easy to perfectly create something but to make some fundamental miss-step with the overall design.
- hinkley 9y ago
  Obsessing over minutiae won't help you to see the bigger picture. You can paint Get’er done people with that brush too. Efficiently producing wrong code helps nobody but yourself. There are flavors of good engineering that allow the team to maintain velocity year over year. Too often those techniques get thrown under the perfectionism bus and then later the team blames “bad luck” [edit or ‘stupid people’ not them] for their failures.
  - lhnz 9y ago
    This misinterprets what I'm saying. Which is: people that focus on perfection are too often working diligently on their own, sweating details which are unimportant to the quality of the outcome. I frequently meet people that believe themselves to be 'perfectionists' but whom create poor quality work due to a reluctance to let other see their work before it is 'done'. In order to get perfection, you need to be doing the right thing. In order to do the right thing, you cannot be working within a bubble. Edit: I think everybody read things into what I said which weren't there. "Look an anti-perfectionist! He must be against quality work. Little does he realise that we can be faster by focusing on 'perfection'." This is true but you need to make sure that you are not adding finesse to the wrong solution!
andrewmcwatters 9y ago
So instead of being a perfectionist who might never see the end of their work, be a doist and never try to complete your work to begin with. Yeah, I'm old enough to see how that works out on large timescales. No thanks.
danschumann 9y ago
Lately I've been doing tasks from easiest to hardest. I no longer seem like a perfectionist. Let me explain... I used to do whatever I felt like, and typically, I was doing the hardest tasks first. I would leave the little stuff. "Oh that's easy, I can just do that at the end". Creating social media accounts was the last thing on my TODO list. One day, I thought I'd apply Dave Ramseys "Pay off your debts smallest to largest" principle to my technical debts. One of the first things I did was create social media accounts. And a bunch of other small stuff that was biting at me. Another decision I made was to launch earler with fewer features. Why? Because many of the sample use cases (the simple ones), didn't need the more advanced features. So, smallest to largest dictates that I must make the easy samples before I finish the advanced features. And, if I have samples, I can launch. So, my perfectionism was a symptom, but the problem was my priority system: hardest to easiest, not easiest to hardest. (Inevitably, someone will write about "do your hardest task in the morning when you have the most energy". Well, I freelance in the morning when I have the most will power, so this is moot. Doing tasks easiest to hardest gives the most accomplishments earliest [ more items checked off the todo list ], which provides positivity and motivation to keep going. Imagine the scenario: You have 3 hours to work, you do your hardest task, which takes 5 hours. You don't get it done, and think "omg I didn't finish and I still have 9 other things to do". Or, you do your easiest tasks first. Most take 5-10 minutes. You finish 5 tasks in your 3 hour window, and think, Geez! I'm really productive today! I should keep working, so you work another 2 hours and get 6, 7, 8 done. Momemtum is key. Doing easy tasks first creates success feelings that make you work longer. It also frees up mental space ( you no longer need to mentally track those tasks ). Launch is almost always EASIER than the hard PERFECTION features that a perfectionist makes.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  I do this! Snowball method for time instead of money. Momentum is easily one of the the most powerful forces in my life, both good and bad, so I try hard to keep it working in my favor.
- lemonberry 9y ago
  If I remember correctly, David Allen, of 'Getting Things Done' fame, makes a similar argument: if it can be done in 5 mins or less do it now rather than defer. I've definitely noticed the benefit of this. On the other hand, small things add up and occasionally I've just got to tackle that 5 hour task.
ohazi 9y ago
Many of the most intelligent and capable people I know suffer from impostor syndrome to some degree. It can vary from worrying that you might not be as good as your peers, to being afraid to release something because you're worried it's not perfect yet, to a paralyzing inability to start, because you're stuck in a mental loop overthinking dependencies and prerequisites. Smart people spend lots of time learning, thinking about things, and relying on their (often overactive) imaginations. It's not surprising that spending so much time in your own head can sometimes lead you astray. A helpful response would be to reassure and encourage your peers. Point out when there's objective evidence that they are doing a good job, because they may not be able to see it on their own. In this light, the attitude displayed by the current top level commenters is extremely disappointing [0,1]. Insinuating that your coworkers are slow or out of their depth in circumstances like these is counterproductive. IMHO, this "maybe you're just not good enough" attitude is one of the most toxic aspects of living in silicon valley and the bay area. I am a perfectionist, and I know that I waste gobs of time over-analyzing absolutely everything [2]. I also know that my best work only happens when I force myself to set aside that perfectionism and just start. It doesn't matter if it's terrible, it doesn't matter if I picked the wrong library -- wasting more time over-analyzing everything never gets me anywhere, and leaves me feeling miserable at the end of the day. I know, objectively, that this is the case, and yet I still hesitate to start big projects, and still attempt to use spreadsheets to plan the most trivial of things. It's not an easy habit to break, but it's absolutely worthwhile to keep trying. I owe a lot to the peers and managers who have helped me stay on track. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16335156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16335156 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334873 [2] https://xkcd.com/1952/ https://xkcd.com/1952/
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  Definitely agree on that second one: “harhar, all perfectionists are making excuses for their lack of skill and keeping me from my brilliant work!!” Not someone I’d want to work with, but I’m sure he’d think I’m too slow and stupid anyway :)
- kaybe 9y ago
  I am at my best when I don't really care too much about being good. Sadly this is hard to impossible to force.
spraak 9y ago
The book "The Now Habit" offers the perspective that many people who procrastinate suffer from perfectionism. That is, they are so concerned with achieving an idealized result that they are unable to even begin, lest they fail.
- gbacon 9y ago
  "Who are the Biggest Procrastinators?"[0] by David Allen [0]: https://gettingthingsdone.com/2016/06/who-are-the-biggest-procrastinators/ https://gettingthingsdone.com/2016/06/who-are-the-biggest-pr...
louwrentius 9y ago
If you consider your work a 1.0 then you accept 'shortcomings'. It's important that you are able to deliver that 1.0 and that despite its shortcomings, it does what it was supposed to do and value is derived from it (in the broadest sense possible). The real value is in knowing what is important and what is not. The real value is to be able to make sane tradeoffs within a particular context. That is how to get things done.
- ralmeida 9y ago
  Not surprisingly, repeating to yourself “it’s just your first draft” is one of the tools mentioned in the book The Now Habit, which treats procastination as a symptom of an anxiety problem possibly caused by a perfectionism complex. Other comments in this thread have also mentioned the book.
sifoo 9y ago
Can't really agree with most of that. I've found that the more experience I get, the more time I spend waiting for my brain to pattern match is way through problems; which might take several days. The trick is to be observant enough to notice when it gets stuck and take that as a cue that more empirical data is needed to get unstuck. As well as to stop pushing and wait for more pattern matching if the code starts drifting into la la land. Trusting the process, basically. I realize that might not work as well without 30 years of training. Which brings us to the problem with best practices in general; they are at best signs pointing in the right direction for someone at some point, but tend to be institutionalized as divine truth.
a3_nm 9y ago
I think it may be too simple to say that perfectionism is bad. To me, it's one of two halves of the creative process. (At least in theoretical research, which is what I do, but I think this generalizes to other fields.) You have one half where you need completely crazy and wild ideas, where it's vitally important to get started and not be paralyzed because you think that something is stupid or wrong or will not work. Here perfectionism is an enemy. But you have the other half where you look at what you did and you try to figure out how good it is, and how it can be improved. Here, perfectionism is important because it's what will point out to you the flaws in what you have done so far. I think the best work is created by iterating between these two mindsets. (It's even better if you can iterate with someone, where you go over what the other did until you converge.) So I think perfectionism is something that can drive you to improve, as long as you retain the capacity to turn it off half the time, especially where you're trying to get started.
- frading 9y ago
  Absolutely. No extreme is ever good. Shipping and forgetting is a recipe to do mediocre work. But I rarely witnessed that. What I see very often, though, is people not feeling ready to share what they have. And I've been in countless conversations to urge people to fight this instinct (which I'm guilty of too often as well).
doall 9y ago
After studying and felt in love with machine learning, I think I have succeeded in analytically dealing with my perfectionism. In my case, I was always trying to achieve a local minimum with the cost of 0, and it was overfitting. I was more into integers and algebraic equality rather than floating-point numbers, analytic inequality, probability, and statistics. But after studying machine learning and the related stuff, somehow my mind changed and I now embrace the latter. What is important for me now is to visualize a cost, try to minimize for a general case, stop when passing a threshold, and carefully monitor the whole process. I can plot my current position or cost and see how it change over time and happily stop when things not go well, which I couldn't do in the past that harmed me.
xstartup 9y ago
90% of the functionality delivered now is better than 100% of it delivered never
AnotherHustler 9y ago
"The Inner Game of Tennis" is a great read on this subject!
dlwdlw 9y ago
I think perfectionism can also be a crutch used as a weapon. The podium of perfectionism allows a moral high ground that is also an excuse to not engage with reality. The image is too pretty to soil. Reality is engaged with only when you have secret tricks or hacks so that any game can be ended at will. When you engage in games as a gamemaster it is no longer a game, it is boring. Executives use similar methods to create an image of perfection. This is actually good and necessary as their main function is to create games for others as a bubble while also siphoning value. Without the game, the master-slave dynamic is too raw. Perfectionists are people who don't play games they don't think they can win. This can stifle learning, create aloofness, and make for a boring and meaningless life. At its core it is an illusion of the self having more control over reality than a human possibly can. It is a desire to be closer to God and so gives up some humanity. (which is necessarily imperfect) Of course, when pushing or expanding the limits of humanity, pefectionism can sometimes be good. Shutting yourself in for a while can be very useful for creation. Learning is not necessary as the act is of the self, the raw knowledge being acquired already. Meaning is also not necessary because it is self-generating. However to lock in that meaning, what is created must eventually be released and tested in the world. The 2 way interaction within a network is what creates larger meaning. Small releases are like small strategic bets. Big releases (perfectionism)are like going all in and hoping for the best.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  "Perfectionists are people who don't play games they don't think they can win." I think you defined the opposite of a gambler more than a perfectionist here. As in, most normal people. Perfectionists are people who don't play a game they do not completely master. Also attempt to hide eons of practice and mistakes to appear saintly. This is a vast difference.

116 points by frading 9y ago

Hello all, OP here. Don't hesitate to shoot any questions if you have any. This blog is mostly oriented towards filmmakers, but the concept of perfecting vs completing can apply just as well to web or technical endeavors.

dootdootdoot 9y ago
Have you struggled with perfectionism?
grasshopperpurp 9y ago
Thanks for posting this! Have you noticed a difference in people who are more accustomed to tapping into their flow state? Might be hard to get honest answers from people, I realize.
- frading 9y ago
  Is tapping into your flow state a similar thing to "being in the zone"? In which case, it's hard to tell, since it is quite subconscious. I'd be tempted to say that being in the zone (if that's what you mean, let me know if not) happens to people who allow themselves to be less self-conscious, to be less disturbed by their own ego. In which case it may help them create better or more focused work. Although I realize I will probably give this a bit more thoughts, since that's interesting :)
  - grasshopperpurp 9y ago
    >Is tapping into your flow state a similar thing to "being in the zone"? Yep, exactly! I could see people who try to control things too much having a hard time getting into that state/zone and replacing it with a long cycle of fussing, but that's just how I imagine it might work. Thanks for the reply :^)
    - frading 9y ago
      That actually makes me think about 2 things now: 1. Being in the zone is good, but you may be functioning mostly on instinct, so the more experience you have, the better results you ll get. By that I mean that it s where that thing called craft helps you. You then have some techniques that you can rely on, and not only your gut feelings. 2. While being in the zone, it's still good to jump out of it and criticize your own work (as in you always have to be your best critic). It s almost as if criticizing yourself should be a reflex, part of your instinct. Sometimes I imagine someone commenting what I do and me trying to defend my work. If I can't defend it well, that means I better look into :) And I've mentioned that in another comment, but that applies to any work, whether it is considered creative or technical (knowing that there is a big overlap between those). As a person doing films and web app, my thinking is not very different from one to the other. (Thanks to you for making me think about this)
      - davidjnelson 9y ago
        Flow states have been studied for a while now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) I feel this diagram sums it up very succinctly: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Challenge_vs_skill.svg/300px-Challenge_vs_skill.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Ch... Powerful stuff.
        frading 9y ago
        Excellent, thank you for those links. I will read them carefully.
      - grasshopperpurp 9y ago
        >1. Being in the zone is good, but you may be functioning mostly on instinct, so the more experience you have, the better results you ll get. By that I mean that it s where that thing called craft helps you. You then have some techniques that you can rely on, and not only your gut feelings. Absolutely! The work of creating comes in the preparation - on one's self and craft. It's like a boxer or mixed martial artist. The time in the ring is the payoff for all the hard work. It's also the moment of judgement for that work and talent. 2 Chainz says, Hard work beats talent, and I tend to agree. >2. While being in the zone, it's still good to jump out of it and criticize your own work (as in you always have to be your best critic). It s almost as if criticizing yourself should be a reflex, part of your instinct. Sometimes I imagine someone commenting what I do and me trying to defend my work. If I can't defend it well, that means I better look into :) For writing poetry, I've settled on something similar. I do think the medium affects the approach. There are times when I will write a page and a half in flow state and read it to realize I only like two lines, and I'll still feel it was time well spent. In visual arts, you can't really do this. Most of the time, I write in a flow state until something breaks the rhythm - typically the emotional/mental impact, rather than meter. When the rhythm breaks, I rewrite the part that works (physically, not editing) and attempt to take a different turn from that point. So, in the process of creating, for writing anyway, I think the editor should hang around just enough to shoo the creator onto the right path. The cutting room is a different story. Really enjoy learning about the way you approach all this! Thanks! :^)

sitkack 9y ago

I have realized that my perfectionism is a mask for a fragile ego.

frading 9y ago
ha, that's not exactly what I mean in this post, I hope that's not what you would take away. (although you might just be sarcastic) What leads us to perfect our work (and prevents us from shipping) is hopefully not an ego problem. It's just that we might be too eager to keep improving it, instead of enjoying the current state. It's just like the belief that adding yet another feature to an app will solve everything.
- curiousgal 9y ago
  http://explosm.net/comics/3433/ http://explosm.net/comics/3433/
  - soared 9y ago
    Also in song form! 998 good bricks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep6WVKEuk24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep6WVKEuk24
- sitkack 9y ago
  I believe that behavior is in the minority of people. Perfectionism is much more complex affliction than simply striving for perfection.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

danieltillett 9y ago

99% of the perfectionists I have had the misfortune to work with are just slow or out of their depth and are using the term as an emotional crutch. How much nicer it is to tell yourself that you are a perfectionist than you are just not very good at whatever you are doing. The people that turn out near perfect work are usually the fastest and just get things done. It is a pity they are so rare.

tomnipotent 9y ago
Producing perfect work has nothing to do with perfectionism.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  That is certainly true.
bhnmmhmd 9y ago
> How much nicer it is to tell yourself that you are a perfectionist than you are just not very good at whatever you are doing. By that logic, Steve Jobs should have never been good at what he was doing... I'm sorry, but this notion of yours is kinda insulting to all the perfectionists that had the misfortune of living in a world that doesn't appreciate them.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  While it is debatable if Steve Jobs was a perfectionist, even if he were all it would mean is he is one of the 1%. It is more of a rant caused by me having to wait for the perfectionists to finish their third rate work so I can get on with mine :)
  - frading 9y ago
    I'm not even sure Steve Jobs claimed to be a perfectionist. "Doing great work" might be more how he would have phrased it, as well as iterating on it.

MattyRad 9y ago

This reminds me of the Cult of Done Manifesto, which focuses on doing and action. https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2ff13 https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...

frading 9y ago
Thanks for sharing, I didn't know that. I love the last point "Done is the engine of more"!

n1000 9y ago

I think there is a very thin line between perfectionism and being insecure. For instance, a person with ADHD is prone to doing a lot of errors and overlooking obvious issues. One coping mechanism is to triple check whatever you do. Some people may have developed this strategy early on in their childhood and never realized.

frading 9y ago
Triple checking is fine to me. I do it plenty of times. But it certainly depends on how long this would require and what it is spent on. For instance, I re-read my posts several times before publishing (and still wondering if I left typos). But for the design, I'm happy to leave things as a work in progress, knowing I will come back to it later. It's all about choosing your battles.

maldusiecle 9y ago

I'm really skeptical of this attitude. In a lot of fields I've seen people who commit themselves to "just getting it done." The result is that they do get a lot of work done: and it's bad, it's mediocre, it doesn't have value. On the other hand, one can easily think of creators who spent a long time on one work (maybe "too much" time), and the result was work of lasting value. Of course, this relates more to artistic work than technical matters. But I think it is damaging to act as if all work is equivalent to deadlined development work. Great things come from people being impractical.

frading 9y ago
> Great things come from people being impractical Yes, but in my experience this is more an exception, compared to the vast majority of people who never ship anything, because "it's not quite right yet". That's where the danger lies. And I think there are plenty of similarities between art and tech, regarding this. For a web app, it will have to be shared before growing in quality and becoming great. Github, Basecamp, Twitter all did that. It's always about having a first released being a kick ass half or a half ass product (Getting Real was phrasing it like that if I recall correctly). Same for a film. It might be released on a specific date to a wide audience, but it has gone through many iterations, discussed between dozens of people. And just getting it done does not mean that you have to stop everything once your deadline has passed. If there is more work that you want to add to improve it, do it. But at least you've shared it as an intermediary stage, and you and your work have probably both grown from that. And you can now give yourself another deadline.
- stouset 9y ago
  As someone who spent the first ten years of their career desperately trying to salvage one steaming heap of technical debt and security disasters after another, I think we have wildly diverging opinions of the consequences of software development driven primarily by just trying to get something committed and out there. In my opinion, every single one of these companies was effectively a zombie: dead, but unaware of it.
  - 9y ago

f1mint 9y ago

http://www.f1mint.com/technology http://www.f1mint.com/technology

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

lhnz 9y ago

Obsessing over minutiae won't help you to see the bigger picture. I think it's important to show your work early, in order that others can feedback. It's very easy to perfectly create something but to make some fundamental miss-step with the overall design.

hinkley 9y ago
Obsessing over minutiae won't help you to see the bigger picture. You can paint Get’er done people with that brush too. Efficiently producing wrong code helps nobody but yourself. There are flavors of good engineering that allow the team to maintain velocity year over year. Too often those techniques get thrown under the perfectionism bus and then later the team blames “bad luck” [edit or ‘stupid people’ not them] for their failures.
- lhnz 9y ago
  This misinterprets what I'm saying. Which is: people that focus on perfection are too often working diligently on their own, sweating details which are unimportant to the quality of the outcome. I frequently meet people that believe themselves to be 'perfectionists' but whom create poor quality work due to a reluctance to let other see their work before it is 'done'. In order to get perfection, you need to be doing the right thing. In order to do the right thing, you cannot be working within a bubble. Edit: I think everybody read things into what I said which weren't there. "Look an anti-perfectionist! He must be against quality work. Little does he realise that we can be faster by focusing on 'perfection'." This is true but you need to make sure that you are not adding finesse to the wrong solution!

andrewmcwatters 9y ago

So instead of being a perfectionist who might never see the end of their work, be a doist and never try to complete your work to begin with. Yeah, I'm old enough to see how that works out on large timescales. No thanks.

danschumann 9y ago

Lately I've been doing tasks from easiest to hardest. I no longer seem like a perfectionist. Let me explain... I used to do whatever I felt like, and typically, I was doing the hardest tasks first. I would leave the little stuff. "Oh that's easy, I can just do that at the end". Creating social media accounts was the last thing on my TODO list. One day, I thought I'd apply Dave Ramseys "Pay off your debts smallest to largest" principle to my technical debts. One of the first things I did was create social media accounts. And a bunch of other small stuff that was biting at me. Another decision I made was to launch earler with fewer features. Why? Because many of the sample use cases (the simple ones), didn't need the more advanced features. So, smallest to largest dictates that I must make the easy samples before I finish the advanced features. And, if I have samples, I can launch. So, my perfectionism was a symptom, but the problem was my priority system: hardest to easiest, not easiest to hardest. (Inevitably, someone will write about "do your hardest task in the morning when you have the most energy". Well, I freelance in the morning when I have the most will power, so this is moot. Doing tasks easiest to hardest gives the most accomplishments earliest [ more items checked off the todo list ], which provides positivity and motivation to keep going. Imagine the scenario: You have 3 hours to work, you do your hardest task, which takes 5 hours. You don't get it done, and think "omg I didn't finish and I still have 9 other things to do". Or, you do your easiest tasks first. Most take 5-10 minutes. You finish 5 tasks in your 3 hour window, and think, Geez! I'm really productive today! I should keep working, so you work another 2 hours and get 6, 7, 8 done. Momemtum is key. Doing easy tasks first creates success feelings that make you work longer. It also frees up mental space ( you no longer need to mentally track those tasks ). Launch is almost always EASIER than the hard PERFECTION features that a perfectionist makes.

ryanwaggoner 9y ago
I do this! Snowball method for time instead of money. Momentum is easily one of the the most powerful forces in my life, both good and bad, so I try hard to keep it working in my favor.
lemonberry 9y ago
If I remember correctly, David Allen, of 'Getting Things Done' fame, makes a similar argument: if it can be done in 5 mins or less do it now rather than defer. I've definitely noticed the benefit of this. On the other hand, small things add up and occasionally I've just got to tackle that 5 hour task.

ohazi 9y ago

Many of the most intelligent and capable people I know suffer from impostor syndrome to some degree. It can vary from worrying that you might not be as good as your peers, to being afraid to release something because you're worried it's not perfect yet, to a paralyzing inability to start, because you're stuck in a mental loop overthinking dependencies and prerequisites. Smart people spend lots of time learning, thinking about things, and relying on their (often overactive) imaginations. It's not surprising that spending so much time in your own head can sometimes lead you astray. A helpful response would be to reassure and encourage your peers. Point out when there's objective evidence that they are doing a good job, because they may not be able to see it on their own. In this light, the attitude displayed by the current top level commenters is extremely disappointing [0,1]. Insinuating that your coworkers are slow or out of their depth in circumstances like these is counterproductive. IMHO, this "maybe you're just not good enough" attitude is one of the most toxic aspects of living in silicon valley and the bay area. I am a perfectionist, and I know that I waste gobs of time over-analyzing absolutely everything [2]. I also know that my best work only happens when I force myself to set aside that perfectionism and just start. It doesn't matter if it's terrible, it doesn't matter if I picked the wrong library -- wasting more time over-analyzing everything never gets me anywhere, and leaves me feeling miserable at the end of the day. I know, objectively, that this is the case, and yet I still hesitate to start big projects, and still attempt to use spreadsheets to plan the most trivial of things. It's not an easy habit to break, but it's absolutely worthwhile to keep trying. I owe a lot to the peers and managers who have helped me stay on track. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16335156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16335156 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334873 [2] https://xkcd.com/1952/ https://xkcd.com/1952/

ryanwaggoner 9y ago
Definitely agree on that second one: “harhar, all perfectionists are making excuses for their lack of skill and keeping me from my brilliant work!!” Not someone I’d want to work with, but I’m sure he’d think I’m too slow and stupid anyway :)
kaybe 9y ago
I am at my best when I don't really care too much about being good. Sadly this is hard to impossible to force.

spraak 9y ago

The book "The Now Habit" offers the perspective that many people who procrastinate suffer from perfectionism. That is, they are so concerned with achieving an idealized result that they are unable to even begin, lest they fail.

gbacon 9y ago
"Who are the Biggest Procrastinators?"[0] by David Allen [0]: https://gettingthingsdone.com/2016/06/who-are-the-biggest-procrastinators/ https://gettingthingsdone.com/2016/06/who-are-the-biggest-pr...

louwrentius 9y ago

If you consider your work a 1.0 then you accept 'shortcomings'. It's important that you are able to deliver that 1.0 and that despite its shortcomings, it does what it was supposed to do and value is derived from it (in the broadest sense possible). The real value is in knowing what is important and what is not. The real value is to be able to make sane tradeoffs within a particular context. That is how to get things done.

ralmeida 9y ago
Not surprisingly, repeating to yourself “it’s just your first draft” is one of the tools mentioned in the book The Now Habit, which treats procastination as a symptom of an anxiety problem possibly caused by a perfectionism complex. Other comments in this thread have also mentioned the book.

sifoo 9y ago

Can't really agree with most of that. I've found that the more experience I get, the more time I spend waiting for my brain to pattern match is way through problems; which might take several days. The trick is to be observant enough to notice when it gets stuck and take that as a cue that more empirical data is needed to get unstuck. As well as to stop pushing and wait for more pattern matching if the code starts drifting into la la land. Trusting the process, basically. I realize that might not work as well without 30 years of training. Which brings us to the problem with best practices in general; they are at best signs pointing in the right direction for someone at some point, but tend to be institutionalized as divine truth.

a3_nm 9y ago

I think it may be too simple to say that perfectionism is bad. To me, it's one of two halves of the creative process. (At least in theoretical research, which is what I do, but I think this generalizes to other fields.) You have one half where you need completely crazy and wild ideas, where it's vitally important to get started and not be paralyzed because you think that something is stupid or wrong or will not work. Here perfectionism is an enemy. But you have the other half where you look at what you did and you try to figure out how good it is, and how it can be improved. Here, perfectionism is important because it's what will point out to you the flaws in what you have done so far. I think the best work is created by iterating between these two mindsets. (It's even better if you can iterate with someone, where you go over what the other did until you converge.) So I think perfectionism is something that can drive you to improve, as long as you retain the capacity to turn it off half the time, especially where you're trying to get started.

frading 9y ago
Absolutely. No extreme is ever good. Shipping and forgetting is a recipe to do mediocre work. But I rarely witnessed that. What I see very often, though, is people not feeling ready to share what they have. And I've been in countless conversations to urge people to fight this instinct (which I'm guilty of too often as well).

doall 9y ago

After studying and felt in love with machine learning, I think I have succeeded in analytically dealing with my perfectionism. In my case, I was always trying to achieve a local minimum with the cost of 0, and it was overfitting. I was more into integers and algebraic equality rather than floating-point numbers, analytic inequality, probability, and statistics. But after studying machine learning and the related stuff, somehow my mind changed and I now embrace the latter. What is important for me now is to visualize a cost, try to minimize for a general case, stop when passing a threshold, and carefully monitor the whole process. I can plot my current position or cost and see how it change over time and happily stop when things not go well, which I couldn't do in the past that harmed me.

xstartup 9y ago

90% of the functionality delivered now is better than 100% of it delivered never

AnotherHustler 9y ago

"The Inner Game of Tennis" is a great read on this subject!

dlwdlw 9y ago

I think perfectionism can also be a crutch used as a weapon. The podium of perfectionism allows a moral high ground that is also an excuse to not engage with reality. The image is too pretty to soil. Reality is engaged with only when you have secret tricks or hacks so that any game can be ended at will. When you engage in games as a gamemaster it is no longer a game, it is boring. Executives use similar methods to create an image of perfection. This is actually good and necessary as their main function is to create games for others as a bubble while also siphoning value. Without the game, the master-slave dynamic is too raw. Perfectionists are people who don't play games they don't think they can win. This can stifle learning, create aloofness, and make for a boring and meaningless life. At its core it is an illusion of the self having more control over reality than a human possibly can. It is a desire to be closer to God and so gives up some humanity. (which is necessarily imperfect) Of course, when pushing or expanding the limits of humanity, pefectionism can sometimes be good. Shutting yourself in for a while can be very useful for creation. Learning is not necessary as the act is of the self, the raw knowledge being acquired already. Meaning is also not necessary because it is self-generating. However to lock in that meaning, what is created must eventually be released and tested in the world. The 2 way interaction within a network is what creates larger meaning. Small releases are like small strategic bets. Big releases (perfectionism)are like going all in and hoping for the best.

AstralStorm 9y ago
"Perfectionists are people who don't play games they don't think they can win." I think you defined the opposite of a gambler more than a perfectionist here. As in, most normal people. Perfectionists are people who don't play a game they do not completely master. Also attempt to hide eons of practice and mistakes to appear saintly. This is a vast difference.