Progress, not perfection: Getting comfortable with ‘good enough’
Photo by Simone Mascellari on Unsplash
If you are an academic—at any stage in your career from graduate student on up—then you may have also been one of those high-achieving students who got straight A’s in high school and university. You were likely the standard to which your parents or teachers held your siblings or other students. Experiences like this when you’re younger often lead to untenable expectations for yourself later. Specifically, I’m talking about the trap you build for yourself with the mindset ‘if it’s not perfect, then it’s not done.’
The problem with the perfectionist mentality is that it simply slows down your progress. As the (adapted) saying goes, perfect is the enemy of done. Ultimately, perfectionism can lead to procrastination and burnout, causing you to be less successful in your career in the long run. This is what perfectionism might look like in practice: you find yourself constantly tweaking your manuscript or grant drafts; slightly changing a wording of a sentence here or there for days on end. Then, when your supervisor or collaborator starts asking where the draft is, you realize you’ve been working on it for far too long given the rough shape that it’s in, and you start to avoid sending it out for feedback at all, bringing progress to a halt. Or maybe perfectionism looks like the adding of so many conditions to an experiment in an effort to be sure that you can account for any possible confounds in your results, that you now have an unwieldy 4-hour experiment that counterbalances over 100+ participants, and consequently, the experiment will take far longer to run and be more challenging to interpret than a series of smaller, practical, programmatic studies would have been. Perfect is the enemy of done. Death by a thousand improvements.
On the surface, perfectionism looks like you’re being careful or thoughtful. Or that you set a higher bar for yourself than others set for themselves. But in reality, perfectionism is often just fear and insecurity in disguise. Fear of failing at the very thing you care so much about, fear that you will be judged, harshly, or that others will think you aren’t good enough. That fear fuels imposter syndrome, and keeps you stuck, pouring more and more time into a project with little—sometimes no—return.
The good news is that there are mindset shifts that can help you break free from perfectionism.
Embrace B- work. This nugget of wisdom comes from my good friend and collaborator Kelly Shen. We were working on a series of papers together and we were each struggling with some personal challenges. To get it all done on time, we couldn’t aim for A+ work out of the gates. That was just too much pressure, and it would have overwhelmed us and paralyzed our progress. Instead, we mindfully and explicitly created a judgment-free zone where we would each create a B- draft of our respective sections and then hand it off to the other for comments and revisions. With this method, we hit our deadlines, and ultimately created some of my favourite papers to date.
My graduate school mentor, Neal Cohen, had a similar philosophy. When we would collaborate on a manuscript, he would say, “just get something in every spot”. This meant that there was zero expectation that the writing, or even the order of the manuscript sections, was going to be perfect. The goal was to get enough down so that we had something to play with. The lesson of ‘B- work’ and ‘get something in every spot’ is that there is incredible power—and speed—in setting your fears aside, putting together a very ugly first draft within a specified deadline, asking for feedback, and then iterating on that feedback to create something fabulous.
Remember that academia is meant to be a collaborative endeavor. Your supervisor and/or your colleagues are there to support and uplift you, and they want to be involved in the creative process. Treat your colleagues’ feedback as an opportunity to improve your work, not as a reflection of your value. Even if feels tough to hear, remember that thoughtful critique often signals that others believe in you and in the potential of your work.
Chasing perfection can leave you flat on your face. Instead, if you can focus on progress, one foot in front of the other in a steady and consistent manner, you will find that you can achieve success even faster than before.
Where in your work are you holding out for perfection? And how would it feel to give yourself permission to start with B- work instead? If you’re ready to shift your mindset and find a new way forward, let’s talk.
Next week: Networking: How to talk to your heroes
