Chapter 14: Perfectionism

St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic

Life is full of paradoxes. For example, perfectionism has been a blight on my career trajectory. Obsessively agonizing over grades and being afraid of failure doesn’t exactly lend itself to action.

However, in the same breath I can praise my perfectionism for giving me a career trajectory. Grades got me into my university program, which helped me land internships, that gave me experience and money, which gave me confidence, that landed me in a full time job, which led to more experience, money, and confidence.

It’s a curse and a blessing. There’s definitely a time and a place to obsess over the details but, very often, perfectionism can hold me back.

A saying that is helping me find the virtue in the mean is "don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good". If I need to be perfect, then I’ll never publish anything, I won’t take risks, and I won’t move forward.

But this doesn’t undermine the skill of having a high attention to detail, it channels it. The goal of entrepreneurship isn’t just to make money, it’s to build something amazing that enriches peoples lives. Maybe that sentiment makes me a bad entrepreneur but it definitely makes me a better builder.

In each chapter I give one concrete step that I’ve taken so you can follow along.

Concrete step #14: Stop trying to be perfect. Settle for good (or at least great).

I’ve been working on this budgeting app for the past 4 months. I said I’d be done by the end of May. I failed. I could give up, never set another goal ever again, and slink into hiding, or I could thank the deadline for motivating me to get this far (the app is running on both iOS and Android) and just keep rocking.

In the same spirit, my next goal is to have the beta version of the app published to both stores by the end of the month.

DISCLAIMER:

I've never done this before and I'm learning as I go. Be cautious because I will make mistakes, but also be inspired because if I can start a business, so can you.