Done is Better Than Perfect
You're good at your job and you pride yourself in knowing the ideal way to do things. And since you want to raise the bar, you hold others to the same standard. This will surely get you noticed and promoted, right?
But then you get passed over for promotion and when you look around, you notice that the people that do get promoted are delivering work that's much less rigorous than yours. Can people not tell the difference, or what's going on?
If you're a high performer, it's easy to slide into perfectionism. It starts early: School and college train us in scientific methods, and anything that deviates from the ideal solution gets point deductions.
This academic approach is often carried over into the workplace, especially in rigorous fields like Data Science & Analytics.
However, the reality is: In high-growth companies, getting stuff done is more important than perfection. If you can't deliver results at the speed at which the business needs them, it will move forward without you.
This post will show you how to prevent that from happening.
I will cover:
- Why Perfectionism is holding you back in your career
- How to spot perfectionism and what to do about it
- When to be pragmatic and when not to
- How to become more pragmatic
Why perfectionism is holding you back
At the surface level, perfectionism sounds good: You strive for excellence based on your intrinsic desire for perfection. Nothing you produce will ever make your manager or the company look bad.
But perfectionism can become a major blocker to your career progress:
1. Perfectionism lowers your output.
- Studies show that humans assign higher value to short-term outcomes compared to long-term outcomes. That's why we have trouble saving for retirement when we can use that money to go on a vacation right now.
- At work, this means perfectionists try to minimize the chance of making a mistake (that would result in immediate negative consequences) and end up spending too much time polishing deliverables. This results in lower output which, in turn, makes it harder to get promoted.
2. Perfectionism limits your growth opportunities.
- Perfectionists do whatever they can to minimize the possibility of mistakes. The natural consequence of this is that they tend to stay within their comfort zone.
- You started your career as a Marketing Data Scientist B2B SaaS? Better double down on what you already know, even if you discover you're actually more interested in doing Product Analytics in Consumer Fintech. If you switch, you'll have to learn a new industry from scratch and will be much more likely to mess up; why take that risk?
In my experience, perfectionism is especially common with highly analytical people or those with advanced academic backgrounds. And it's becoming more and more common. However:
The hard, but necessary realization to succeed in a high-growth environment is that what got you to this point is not what will get you to the next level.
You might have gotten good grades and admitted to your target grad school program because you were able to deliver flawless work, spending months refining a single paper or project. But you will rarely get the opportunity to showcase this on the job.
It's painful to deliver work thinking "I could have done a much more sophisticated version of that"; sometimes, you feel downright ashamed of the hacky solution you threw together. But it's important to remember that the time you invest in a deliverable quickly hits diminishing returns:
How to spot perfectionism and what to do about it
The first step in tackling perfectionism is to understand what type you're dealing with. There are three types:
- Self-oriented (you hold yourself to impossibly high standards)
- Socially-prescribed (you feel that others require you to be perfect), and
- Other-oriented (you hold others to an unrealistically high bar)
For example, if you realize that your perfectionism comes at least partially from (what you feel are) unrealistically high expectations from your manager, you might need to work with them to address this instead of just trying to shift your own mindset.
Given that perfectionism can stem from many factors, including early childhood experiences, it's not realistic to provide a one-size-fits-all recipe to overcome it in a blog post. Therefore, I'll focus on the different ways that perfectionism shows up in the workplace, and what you can do in these specific situations.
