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Lets ignore the term perfectionism and its meaning for a second. We are people who build and produce (as someone in the comments so eloquently put it) and let
by jayair 18y ago
Lets ignore the term perfectionism and its meaning for a second.
We are people who build and produce (as someone in the comments so eloquently put it) and let say we set out to build X. X happens to takes a set of inputs and produces a set of outputs. It can be built in many different ways, each of which can be affected by a set of external factors. The effects of many of these factors are under our control, other however are not. We have a vision for X and a vision for how people will use it to accomplish a certain task.
Given all these factors (and many others) we build v1 and end up with X'. We look at X' and realize its not the same as X. The difference is caused (lets assume) due to the set of external factors we ignored, set of inputs that we didn't consider and the resulting set of outputs that we couldn't have expected.
Now it should be clear that X != X' is because we didn't consider all the cases along the way. But as human beings we learn from our mistakes and we iterate and X' grows closer to X over time. The important part here is that we iterate and iterations take time.
The author of the article states that "I knew that real artists ship, but I refused to ship mediocre work, which meant I could never ship anything.". Now does he mean he couldn't ship v1 or that he was awe struck by the discrepancies between X and X' that he couldn't iterate.
I also don't understand this part about "...but embraced via lack of symmetry, respect for blemishes, and unsanitized simplicity.". Does he mean we need to accept that we will never be able to perfect what we do? If so then I think he is wrong. We might not get it right on the first try and depending on the complexity of the task we might not get it right on the 100th try but as human beings you can bet that we wont rest till we get it right.
Perfectionism to me is a result of the process of iteration that is carved into our very being. Being human is not the achievement of perfection or in his case the acceptance of our lack of, it is the pursuit of perfection. And the day I forget that fact is the day I would stagnate and perish.
- arakyd 18y agoSounds like your attitude is pretty healthy. As a perfectionist myself, let me say that the key is being able to continue working on v1 even when you anticipate the potential for a problem with the finished v1. The perfectionist failure mode is to restart the iteration every single time a potential problem is perceived. The perfectionist cannot stand the idea that anything, even v1, might fail in a way that was remotely preventable. The perfectionist iterates, but the iteration is a very tight loop that is not large enough to collect good feedback. In pathological cases the iteration never leaves the mind. The obvious problem is that these "mistakes" are far too small to learn anything useful from. It does no good to tell the perfectionist that they have to iterate and learn from failure, because that is exactly what the perfectionist is doing. The problem is that it is more complicated than that - one also has to have the right kind of failures. A person with a healthy attitude towards failure won't even think about it and will naturally tend to let the problem dictate the optimal size of the iteration loop, but the perfectionist will usually always keep their loop too tight to be efficient, or to get anything useful done at all. Being able to let go of that requires the ability to ignore or accept a certain kind of imperfection. Perfection in the limit requires the acceptance and embrace of permanent lack of perfection everywhere else, but especially in the builder. That is what is so hard for the perfectionist to do.
- jhickner 18y agoThanks for your post, it really clicked for me. I certainly suffer from this problem. I have several projects that have gone through major revisions over a period of months or even years, without ever launching. As soon as I see a potential problem down the road, I lose motivation and want to start over with a fresh approach. But then after that delay, often a new technology/framework/version has appeared that would make things so much easier/better/faster, and I start over again. Client work has deadlines that force you to finally make compromises, but it's enormously more difficult to do work for yourself.