How Being Perfect Is The Enemy Of Being Good | FinCalC

Whether it is an Entrepreneur or a Developer, we all want to be perfect from every perspective.

Whether it's a product or a service, we try to make it perfect from every angle and delay to make it available to the outside world just to ensure that it is perfect.

In the personal finance world, we wait to get some extra cash in our bank to open that retirement account that we always wanted to, from several past months. We try to be on a safe side and wait for the paycheck. What we don't realize is we are delaying the good thing, that is opening an account.

You Just Need To Start

"In order to accomplish great things, we need to start and complete it. Fine tune it based on the feedback and with time."

Nobody can build Facebook with all it's perfect features as of now in it's first release. It needs time to be perfect. It needs good reviews to be collected and work to be done on them accordingly to make it a better product.

Twitter didn't come up with the use of hashtags initially. It was the users who started using Twitter with different hashtags that made them think about the potential of using hashtags. They made incremental changes to build the product that we use today with excellent features. It wasn't perfect but it was good. It became perfect with time and reviews.

Jeff Bezos started Amazon with the goal of selling books. With time he saw the potential of selling other things as well and now he is the world's richest person as of the time of writing this article (October 2018).

So don't try to build something or work on your goals with the intention of making it perfect. Just do your work and publish a good product. It will become perfect over time. Don't delay it's availability to the outside world just because it is not perfect from your perspective. You never know how useful it could be for others.

People Have Different Mental Models

People have different perspectives which are called as mental models. Every person sees a product from different angle. What is good for you may not be good for others, and what is incomplete for you may be what is very useful to someone else.

"Don't think about making something perfect. It's ok to be just good initially and improve with time and feedbacks. Important thing is to start and complete."

Have a goal, work on it and make the end product or service available to the outside world. Collect feedback and work on it to improve. Repeat the cycle.

You Will Never Publish If You Seek Perfectionism

Long back when I was working in a start up company, we were working on a project which was a feature creep. Just when we used to complete all the required features, there were more features that were decided by management to be added to the product.

The project never got over. Always there was some or the other feature that was to be included and the publishing time was delayed. This was all because we were seeking perfectionism. 

Management wanted the product to be very perfect with no complaints from users and clients. This is where we should understand that being perfect in all aspects isn't that good.

It is okay to publish a product which is not that perfect as we want. We can make it perfect with time, incrementally. Clients and users will praise us for making good incremental changes over time.

So what are you waiting for? Complete that project you are working on and make it available to the outside world. You will never publish it or make it available to others if you seek perfectionism. It is okay to be just good instead of being perfect. Make changes based on feedbacks, incrementally.

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