Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Perfectionism is a Loser's Strategy - The Diigo Meta page

• 01 Jan 14
  

  dintdot59
  • I probably spent around 100 hours total; some energized, but most mired in the dreary hinterland of editing
  • throughout the process I found myself wrestling with insecurity.
  • the voice of doubt arrived trying to convince me to spend a few more hours editing or to bother a few more people to take a look at my draft. Did I really want a little bit of laziness to be the reason I lost this award?
  • classic battle between perfectionism and lifestyle design.
  • The Source of Value 
  • vast majority of your product’s value comes from your underlying ability.
  • reasonable packaging
  • uality threshold you must cross to be taken seriously
  • It’s not as important as ability, but it’s important enough that you shouldn’t ignore it.
  • final contributor is the time you spend obsessively polishing and worrying and tweaking after you passed the threshold required by your audience.
  • perfectionism-driven work is by far the least important to the overall value of your product.
  • you might still counter that even if perfectionism adds only a little value, it’s still worth it, as every bit helps in a competitive world.
  • Building your ability is not particularly stressful. It’s something you work on day after day, month after month
  • Constructing reasonable packaging can be slightly more stressful as it often requires a lot of work in a relatively short period. But, if you’re a Study Hacks reader, you can tame this process with smart schedules
  • Perfectionism, by contrast, can be incredibly stressful. It puts you in a state of constant worry that you’re on the brink of failure
  •  you’re generating a disproportionate amount of stress for a small amount of value.
  • The benefits of improving your underlying skills will dwarf the benefits of perfectionism

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• 22 Sep 12
  

  L W
  • Here’s the alternative: focus on getting better. The benefits of improving your underlying skills will dwarf the benefits of perfectionism. If you fall just short of some recognition this year then the next year it will be an easy win and the year after that it will seem trivial. In the long run, in other words, this is the approach that allows exceptional achievement to flourish in a life you love to live — an approach, I can attest from recent experience, that lets you shut down the computer and take a dive into the ocean.
• 27 Jul 12
  

  Todd Suomela

  "I was experiencing the classic battle between perfectionism and lifestyle design. This battle is familiar to those who embrace my career craftsman philosophy, because this philosophy requires a balance between becoming “so good they can’t ignore you” and then leveraging this value to build a life you love.
  
  The former goal attracts perfectionism while the latter can’t work if it’s around."

  perfectionism lifestyle work labor doubt gtd productivity academia academic

  • Whether you’re a professor, writer, student, or entrepreneur, your job is to produce products that are valuable to your audience. The more valuable your product, the more reward you receive.

     

    If my grant “product” is valuable, I get the grant. If a writer’s blog “product” is valuable, she gets an audience. And so on.

     

    At the top of this post, I put a plot that displays my intuitive understanding of product value. Consider, in particular, the column on the left side of the plot, which breaks down the contribution of three different factors as follows:

     
     
    • The vast majority of your product’s value comes from your underlying ability.
     
    • The next biggest contributor is providing reasonable packaging for your product. For most audiences, there’s a quality threshold you must cross to be taken seriously. You gain non-trivial value for crossing this threshold. It’s not as important as ability, but it’s important enough that you shouldn’t ignore it.
     
    • The final contributor is the time you spend obsessively polishing and worrying and tweaking after you passed the threshold required by your audience. This perfectionism-driven work is by far the least important to the overall value of your product.

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