Utkarsh Rai, in his insightful video, https://bit.ly/3wCZbRa takes up this question and lays down a definitive point of view.
He cites- "Perfectionism is a double-edged sword. While it can motivate to perform higher and deliver better, it can cause unnecessary anxiety and time consumption."When Google launched Gmail, it remained in beta for almost 5 years. At that time, technology companies used to keep products in beta as a transitional phase between “alpha” (when in-house testers or focus groups try out the software) and the official release. As far as I recall, my first experience with Gmail wasn't particularly buggy but it still preferred to keep beta as a label signalling that that they’re still tweaking the e-mail service and adding new features. Apparently, Google's internal checklist still had stringent requirements that needed to be met before Gmail was fully released. Source: https://bit.ly/3z1CkAn
I find it quite interesting as Google preferred to value perfection before it fully released Gmail and at the same time the users used the product that was 'good enough' (and not necessarily perfect). We see other extreme in the cloud era where anything less than four 9's high availability creates unpleasant headlines.
I find an alternative point of view on this debate in Shreyas Doshi's twitter thread https://bit.ly/31Wr0Xg on LNO Effectiveness Framework for task prioritization. In summary, this framework talks about only a very few of our tasks deserves our inner perfectionist to shine (what he call Leverage tasks) and for other category of tasks- Neutral and Overhead tasks, following a perfectionist mindset will be an overkill and a cause of stress and anxiety.
Borrowing thoughts from Utkarsh Rai's video (watch here https://bit.ly/3wCZbRa) where he articulates the strategies to cut down the obsession with perfectionism and shares the following :
1. Embrace progress in failure
2. Calibrate your standards
3. Cut down Rumination
4. Value utility of time
Sharing my sketchnote on the quote i loved.
What's your take on this ?
Sketchnote:
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