When You Do Anything, Purposefully Aim for 99% Quality
Always leave room for improvement
Not aiming for perfection is the best way to reduce work-related stress. The mindset of aiming for 99% might actually make you more productive with time.
When you want to do your work perfectly, you start wasting time on relatively unimportant aspects of your work. When you focus on minor details, it creates stress.
For most practical purposes, 99% is good enough. If you aim for less than perfect, you can tell yourself you are leaving room for improvement.
What if your work is less than perfect
If you finish your work in the first attempt, you can always improve it when you revisit it.
Suppose you were making a presentation on Keynote or PowerPoint. If you thought you’d give it your 100%, you would try to reach your subjective standard of perfection.
Perfection is never a noble end to pursue. There is no such thing as perfect.
But most of the time, influenced by society, we are trying to touch perfection. We start attempting the impossible. Perfection is not possible in any task or any job. Simple things become difficult — impossible — if we aim for perfection.
Coming back to our presentation example, you would summarize your points — and choose images and backgrounds — and change them, say, a hundred times. If your presentation takes too much time, you may lose interest in finishing it. If you don’t lose interest, you may make it so perfect it lacks the touch of spontaneity and fun.
Some errors are good in our work. They make our work human. Imagine a presentation made by an Artificial Intelligence. Such a presentation may be so perfect everybody would sleep during the presentation. The AI may not choose any stories for the presentation or its example may not be relevant in a fun way or it may chose the wrong type of jokes. Or even if it followed the best practices and formulas to make a presentation, it may end up being overly formulaic.
What a human being can do, a machine can’t do generally. Working extra hard to become more of a robot does not do you any good. Most of the viewers or listeners or readers may like a unique piece more than a formulaic one.
If you make your presentation in your natural style, you use your abilities to express and explain ideas. The attendees may like your flawed masterpiece more than a template-based piece of perfection.
More productivity
Perfection is an enemy of productivity.
Let me tell you a story of a man I met. He was in his forties and he was an amazing artist. He chose to make art his hobby and started an advertising business. His business made him rich. He told me how his financial freedom had allowed him to pursue his artistic dreams. He was trying to create his perfect masterpieces. I said I wanted to see his work. He showed me an eagle, on an easel. It was around 50% complete but what I saw was remarkably good. I asked him when he would complete the painting. He said, “I want it to be perfect. It has taken me five years to create this half-finished masterpiece.”
Imagine how this man could have made himself more productive. When you decide to leave room for improvement — when you aim for 99% quality —you start prioritizing and stop wasting time on less than very important aspects of your work.
When you are trying to prioritize, your mind starts seeing things from a different perspective. This mindset saves you time when you are aiming to be more productive.
You must have read this Chinese proverb: “Were I to await perfection, my book would never be finished.”
The pursuit of perfection wastes an enormous amount of time. It makes you doubt every move you make, on the canvas, or in life.
Ironically, most of the human beings intuitively abhor perfection.
Crochet is a method of creating handkerchiefs and covers by using a crochet hook to interlock loops of yarn or thread. If you create a design, you’ll make a mistake from time to time. Your mistake just lives on the cloth. But if you made a design without any mistake, someone will definitely say, “It looks like a machine-made design.” And if you had spent days trying to perfect your work, you’d be disappointed by the comment.
To avoid such comments, some people purposefully leave mistakes in their work or think of ideas only human beings can do.
No matter how much you fret over making mistakes, remember this: if you lost your ability to make mistakes, you’d also lose your ability to improve in the future.
“One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist…..Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.” ~ Stephen Hawking
Final Thoughts
When you make mistakes, you often learn new things. Hideaki Anno, a Japanese screenwriter, says through one of his characters, “God knows I’m not perfect. I’ve made tons of stupid mistakes, and later I regretted them. And I’ve done it over and over again, thousands of times; a cycle of hollow joy and vicious self-hatred. But even so, every time I learned something about myself.”
Write these down and put the chart on a wall:
- I am going to aim for 99% quality.
- Perfection makes simple things impossible.
- If I aim for 100%, I am not leaving room for future improvement.
- I am ready to accept my mistakes because they allow me to be more human.
- Aiming for perfection reduces productivity.
The beauty of our life depends on the work we do, things we complete. Our dreams need imperfection to inspire us.
I’ll leave you with Haruki Murakami’s words, “Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it’d lose even its imperfection.”
You can read my curated stories here.