If You’re Expecting Perfection, You’re Probably Late.
It’s hard to ignore a flaw when you see it. You know that it is, it is all that you can focus on, and you do not want to accept it. You want to fix this before releasing your work to the public. However, if you’re expecting everything to be perfect, you’re probably just wasting time.
As productivity writer Seth Godin explains, an ideal is rarely an ideal that any of us can practically aspire to. Ideally expensive, time-consuming, and worst of all, rarely provides tangible benefits over “good enough”. Of course, if you are building a space shuttle it should be perfect, but not if you are generating TPS reports. So why are so many of us waiting for the perfect thing to happen? Because it helps us to stall for time:
Perfect is the perfect defense mechanism, the work of the Pressfield Resistance, the lizard brain gives you an outlet. Perfect allows you to linger, ask more questions, do more reviews, blunt, save, and generally avoid anything that might fail (or anything important).
If you don’t pull the trigger until it’s perfect, you may never pull the trigger at all. Perfect stands in your way and tells you to wait. This prevents you from taking the terrible step that you are afraid to take. At some point, you’re probably not worried about perfection, but about the fear of being judged for your flaws.
Refusal of perfection | Seth Godin