Perfectionism Is Killing Your Productivity

If you’re anything like myself you like things to be perfect.

I used to have a tendency to tweak things again and again and ultimately this led me to delaying the completion of many things. For example, if I wrote an essay in advance of its deadline, rather than putting it aside, I’d spend precious time constantly altering sentences which made little difference to the quality of the essay.

In my case, I was trying to perfect an essay, but in your case, you might be prolonging the launch of a new business idea which could potentially make you millions. So in this blog post, I’m going to discuss a lesson related to perfectionism from the book Art & Fear .

On the opening day of term, a ceramics teacher announced to the class that it was being split in two. One half of the class would be graded on the quantity of pots they produced, with 50lbs of pots needed to achieve an ‘A’.  Meanwhile, the other half only had to produce one pot, but it had to be perfect to achieve an ‘A’. The interesting thing was that when the term ended and the students were being graded, the best pots were produced by the quantity group, not the quality group. You see, whilst the perfectionists had sat and theorised about the perfect pot they had nothing to show for themselves. The quantity group on the other hand spent their time actually making pots, and through making mistakes over time they were able to produce far better pots that the perfectionists could ever hope to make.

So, what’s making pots got to do with you achieving more?

The lesson from this story can be put into practice and help you to achieve you full potential. Have you noticed how successful entrepreneurs often have a history of failed businesses? That’s because they’ve failed time and time again, learned from their failures and applied those lessons to their successful ventures! 

Yeah…but what if I don’t want to start a business?

That’s fine! You can still benefit from the story. If you’re a perfectionist, my advice is to put yourself on a schedule and give yourself a deadline by which something needs to be deemed as ‘complete’, that way you can move on to your next objective and ultimately be more productive.

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