Get Everything Done

I'm glad this thread has made it out of the muck of vocabulary—that is to say, I'm glad it got into the muck and then made it out—because not only have you all explored a valuable topic, but you have also illuminated much of its controversy and confusion.

We've been talking about two separate things, one of them good ("excellence") and one bad ("perfecting unimportant things"), both of which are typically labeled "perfectionism" and so tend to be accepted or rejected together as one package. This leads to no end of trouble when setting goals, for an individual or a team.

I myself am a natural perfectionist of both kinds, though periodically I hear something like the "80/20 rule" and convince myself that I should embrace imperfection of both kinds. Of course this never works out, and with relief I revert to my original self, reveling in maximized efficiencies and matching margins. It's been my misfortune to have worked with some dyed-in-the-wool imperfectionists, who see themselves as artists at producing something just beyond junk, scoring extra style points the closer they sink to the level of junk without actually drooping under it (as if playing an inverted game of blackjack), or even releasing known junk with plans to disguise it or blame it on someone else. The creative energy that goes into these plans can be astounding, more than enough to have made bona fide non-junk from the start.

Sadly, discussions on perfectionism tend to follow the delightful chats I used to have with those people: shall we be pathological perfectionists, or junk artists? Even when the topic is developed with much more subtlety and common sense, rarely are we encouraged to be better than, say, an 80% guitar player while accepting worse than an 80% couch.

The issue is not whether to be perfect, but what is important to perfect. Teams should not be debating whether 80% is good enough. They should be clarifying their goal, and its purpose, and then aiming to hit it perfectly. There is something about those junk artists that does not want to be fettered by any such standard, as if they are happier to slither under any bar, no matter how high, than to climb over a much lower one.

All of this intersects at Mark's claim above: "There is obviously a limit beyond which [excellence in all things] is no longer cost effective, but it is a lot higher than most people take it."

Where is the cost-effective limit in organizing your receipts? Improving your professional skills? Cleaning your kitchen? Selecting a gift for your best friend of thirty years? Selecting a couch? What is the effect on your professional, creative life of feeling every relaxing moment interrupted by thoughts of, "Damn this lumpy couch!"?

The standard is not 100% in all things, but it is a lot higher than most people take it.

I used to write software for OCR (optical character recognition), in which we scan a document and attempt to convert it to a word processing file by teaching the computer to recognize all the letters visually. A success rate of 99% was considered quite poor, which often surprises newcomers and laymen. But, considering that an average English word contains 6 or 7 letters, and a 99% success rate means a 1% error rate, we are talking about one word in fifteen misspelled, which yields a pretty horrible-looking document. How many misspellings are acceptable, and why? One per sentence, one per page, one per document ... That is the difference between 99%, 99.9%, 99.99%, ...

The standard is not 100% in all things, but it is a lot higher than most people take it.