Last year, at the Learning from Failure conference at The Campbell Academy, Josh Sharpling (restorative specialist from Dorset) gave an extraordinary lecture on perfectionism. Josh completely understands the type of character that he has, and he understands that he has more than a passing tendency towards perfectionism.
He talks in his lecture about how he spent two hours polishing a provisional crown before he noticed what time had passed. He has had to put checks and balances in place with his nursing team to stop this tendency towards an obsession with the perfect.
The opposite of Josh's character as a pragmatist, a pragmatist understands that almost all the time, ‘good enough’, is exactly what it says it is.
There is a place for perfect, but you have to be very clear about what it takes to get there, and it is extremely rare to reach it.
Most of the time, the skill is to define how good enough, good enough actually needs to be, and when to say it's time to ship it, because it's ready, or at least it's ready enough.
If you wait for perfect conditions, you will almost never begin, and no battle plan ever stands contact with the enemy.
In my world, in the world of dentistry, there are many people who have a tendency towards perfect. They pick particular disciplines generally to work in, although dentistry overall is one that attracts people of that nature. The difficulty for the perfectionist is that you will never be rich chasing perfectionism, only the very smallest amount of the very smallest group who have perfectionism tendencies ever managed to leverage it into economic success.
That is not saying that you should not try to do things to the best of your ability, but it is to understand that it's very, very unusual to be all things to everyone.
Blog Post Number - 4462
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