Perfection is the enemy of good

I heard this phrase once a few years ago in a job interview and it’s stuck with me ever since. The idea is that you don’t need to strive for perfection and that creating something good is….good enough.

This resonated with me for a while, I believe in most aspects of my life I strived for perfection most likely Everything was either wrong or right, complete or incomplete there was no middle ground.

The realisation that such a simple idea but could be so powerful. When it comes to a piece of work ask yourself, are you spending all your time trying create the perfect model, perfect report or even something as simple as the perfect email. Ask yourself next time, are you trying for a perfection or could you spend less time creating something good?

I haven’t posted any blog posts for a while because I wanted them to be perfect. I’ve started about 4 drafts of different posts and never finished. My wife says to me all the time I’m too hard on myself and that I need to give myself a break.

I’m hoping I can and this is my first step. I’d normally rewrite a post several times and it would be days till I published it. This post took an hour to write and it isn’t perfect but it’s good enough.