For the longest time, I did not understand the term “perfectionist”. People use it as a negative personality trait although, when looking at the definition, it strikes me as a desired professional characteristic. And It doesn’t help that listing it as your greatest weakness in an interview has become sort of a meme. The first definitions you’d find on Google are:
- “a person who refuses to accept any standard short of perfection”
- “..someone who has a personality that strives for flawlessness”
- “a person who wants everything to be perfect and demands the highest standards possible”
- “..refuses to do or accept anything that is not as good as it could possibly be.”
While, you might not be jealous of this person (because it has some neurotic flavor to it), from a strictly functional standpoint it sounds positive, right? This is someone you would want to hire, right?
Well… No.
And not because you want to have happy employees, or this person might be burnt out shortly or whatever – these are stories that we, unnecessarily decide to attach.
The reason is a perfectionist work towards the wrong goal. To explain myself I’ll start with my proposed definition of a “perfectionist”. Here it goes:
“A Perfectionist is someone that maximizes for the average value of their actions and not the sum of their values”.
These are not the same. For example, when comparing a smaller set of projects with an average high value, vs a large set of projects with a medium value – you get that each maximizes for a different goal.
Come to think of it this is quite reasonable. Up until your twenties (at least), you were evaluated, almost exclusively by the education system. This system dictates the set of things you ought to do and measures your average performance on them (i.e GPA). This system doesn’t train you to prioritize what to do and what not to do and generally doesn’t reward doing more (or less). It tells you what needs to be done – and you should do it as well as you can.
But that’s not how life works. No one tells you what needs to be done. No one cares about your average. You are measured by the aggregation of your actions and the things you take on. Your brand and your wealth are both the result of the sum of your actions. Your fitness is the sum of your workouts. If you only do one “perfect” workout a month – it’s bye-bye to those abs.
The main reason that maximizing the average will give a sub-optimal sum, is the absurdly universal law of “diminishing returns” (aka “Pareto Principle”). There are very few reward dynamics that fail to present this tapering curve and the inevitable conclusion derived from this dynamic is that at some point, the amount of return from the extra effort will be lower than the return you would get from starting a different project. This is exactly where you choose between maximizing the average and maximizing the mean.
One of the greatest lessons I got from being a manager is that when you have a literally infinite amount of things you could do, it’s obvious that you should start optimizing for the sum. This is how I learned to lower my standards 🙂.
-Nivge
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