There’s a lot to be said about perfectionism but the truth is that it holds most of us back from creating good things. It’s what often stands in the way of starting anything – the fear that whatever we create is not going to be perfect and thus it will be a failure.
One of the most important skills to try and develop is what I’ll call selective perfectionism. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook shared some advice he was given that formative in building Facebook:
He said one of the company’s board members “used to say ‘There’s 100 problems that you have to deal with right now but only one or two of them probably really matter. So just ignore the rest and put all your effort in the couple of things that really matter’.
[From Mistakes? I've made them all ... but Facebook users love the site: Zuckerberg]
Experience should tell us that it is much easier to polish and refine something that is okay and turn it into something good than to go from scratch to great in one step – but often our brains tell us the opposite – that if it is not perfect straight away, it never will be. I’ve found general perfectionism to be my biggest stumbling block in getting my creative work out there. I say this as I approach finishing my own e-book that is now past 400 pages – I’ve battled so many mental demons along the way that this quote really spoke to me.
Rather than seeing all the problems and creating an insurmountable wall, the art of selective perfectionism is the ability to see the problems that are the most important and focus on solving them.
I would say that at the beginning of product creation, the major problem that you need to solve is that you don’t have a product – so getting to a draft product, no matter how awful you might think it will be, puts you at a better place than you were before. Even if the product has little chance of ever being great, you learn how to do the next one better.
At every stage, there will be problems – the trick is to solve the ones that really matter.
