What to Do About NOT Being Perfect

When I imagine my business in the future, it’s perfect. I have a perfect amount of clients, a perfect amount of revenue, a perfect amount of expenses, my customers are perfectly happy with my work, and of course, I have a perfect amount of work-life balance.

But honestly, that seems far fetched. Not all of this is within my control and something somewhere will always go wrong.

This creates a problem: how can we, as entrepreneurs, reconcile the perfection of our dreams with the reality we achieve?

First, Let’s Talk About Perfectionism

Imagine the writer who can’t move on from perfecting their outline to actually write the book. Or the web designer who can’t deliver until they’ve put in another 100 hours on the details and the client is furious.

Perfectionists are the people who can’t start or can’t stop until everything is perfect. They are waiting to feel like their work is good enough and struggle to move to the next stage of development; or they toil away on the littlest details until the opportunity to benefit from their work has passed.

That’s not to say that perfectionism is all bad. In a lot of cases, perfectionism may be the thing that drives you to reach higher. It makes sure you are working in the best possible conditions and doing your best work.

But it is more often the reason a project is late, never finished, and a major impediment to feeling good about the great (but not perfect) work that you do. 

So if not perfection, what is there to strive for?

Rather than focus on making one thing as good as it could possibly be, shift your focus to repetition.

There’s a great story about repetition vs perfectionism in the book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. As the story goes, university photography students were divided into two groups. One group would be graded by a single image that had to be near perfect to receive an A. The other group would be graded based on the quantity of images they turned in at the end of the semester, regardless of quality.

The perfectionist in me would assume that the students who spent all of their time working to perfect a single image would have higher quality images overall. However, at the end of the semester, the professor found that the best images of the class came from the “quantity” students.

The book claims that it’s only by experimenting that we can reach our highest quality of work. One experiment isn’t enough. You have to test different ideas and strategies in different environments—which takes repetition—to learn how to do your best work.

Celebrate the imperfection that moves you forward

When things go wrong, when everything isn’t perfect, you have a choice: you can dwell on the imperfections as a negative, or you can celebrate them as part of your process.

If you want to throw a party, sure celebrate with a party. But what I really mean by celebrate is to appreciate and learn from your mistakes.

The next time you’re working on a project, set the goal to do the project three times instead of perfectly once. You’ll learn something new each time and one of your iterations will shine more than the rest. Plus, this takes off a lot of pressure. You can quickly run through the project, learn what is working and what is not, and focus on the best way to complete the job.

Sometimes the imperfection will be more serious than your creative process. Let’s say you’re dealing with one of the worst feelings: having an unhappy client. Instead of beating yourself up about it, recognize that this is bound to happen. (Sorry, you’re not the only entrepreneur in the world that has never had an unhappy client.) Then take it a step further and see what you can do in your next repetition to make it better.

At every stage of your entrepreneurship journey, you’re going to mess up something and get better at something else. I reflect on my professional progress the same way I look back on photos of me from my tween years to today. I may cringe when I see my hair and eyeliner from middle school, but it was necessary for me to start somewhere, and it took the repetition of starting over every day to finally figure it out.

Not being perfect is going to happen no matter what. The only way to get better is by leaning into the idea that mistakes happen and continue moving forward towards the more refined and polished version of our business.