In my career, there are plenty of folks with plenty of opinions and they all can build their own soapbox. One thing that comes up time and again is the idea of good versus perfect. I’ve seen many people who claim that perfection and the best possible outcome is the only way to go. Others claim that in our attempt for perfection we sidestep good and barrel towards top heavy and unpolished. Where do I stand? Somewhere in the middle.
Perfect is an impossible ideal. Getting there takes constant unrelenting effort and at some point you are going to collapse from exhaustion. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but somewhere down the road you’ll look back and see your time consuming attempt at perfection led to imperfect results. In addition, all of this perfecting can stop you from seeing better solutions along the way. Solutions that aren’t perfect, but are better then what you are perfecting. Are you starting to see the problem? Just because you are perfecting the solution you’ve come up with doesn’t mean you’ve arrived at an ideal solution, let alone the ideal solution.
At the same time, we need to keep good enough in check. As humans, we tend towards easier solutions that work at the time; but what will come of those quick band-aid fixes that we put in along the way? I know I’ve seen my share of those fixes and I’ve seen their aftermath. There’s a certain unspoken standard that you have to suss out over time. Whenever someone says, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I usually respond with, “Is it not broken, or are you just ignoring the problem?”
So, we’re at an impasse: perfection is an impossible ideal and good enough is a slippery slope. What’s a human to do to cope with this kind of problem? Balance. Find that point between good enough and perfection. There’s only one problem with balance, it’s not immediately evident. It takes time, effort and practice (all future topics) to find the sweet spot. So, take your time when looking for a solution, put in a good honest effort when building it, and continue to practice your craft.
Working for months on some damn project that gets watered down and compromised and eats up your time and your soul until when you’re all done with it you realize you’re not proud of it and you don’t even want to show it to anyone… well, there’s no amount of money that is going to make that feel better.
My attention is a fickle sort, it flits back and forth between topics on Philosophy, Psychology, Business, Design and Programming. The idea of being genuine has seen a sort of resurgence in all of these topics recently and I don’t completely understand why it ever went away. It seems that we’ve pushed genuineness aside in lieu of higher profitability, quicker results or some other batch of snake oil. I see and can comprehend that some folks will ignore their morals and their self in order to profit (financially or otherwise), but I think in the long run you are hurting yourself.
Think of the last time you were on the phone for customer support for your credit card. What do you hear every 15-30 seconds? “Thank you for your patience, one of our staff will assist you momentarily.” They think constantly spewing that every so many seconds will really tide us over until we start talking with the customer support representative. Yet, it just seems to incite anger in most people. They don’t seem to have a genuine care about their customers, just their bottom line and a 15 minute wait time doesn’t matter one bit if they aren’t losing customers at an alarming rate.
Contrast that experience to calling Apple for support. First you have to log in using your Apple ID to their website, it’s a hoop but a small one. Then you choose from the hardware you have registered with your account. Then the system checks for your warranty coverage instead of the customer support rep asking for your serial number. (I have to imagine that saves Apple wasted time from misread and mistyped serial numbers.) Then you describe the problem using a few drop-downs and a description. Then you are presented with three options: Call me now, Call me later and I’ll call Apple later. It’s those first two options that shows that Apple genuinely cares about you, your problem and your time. Why do they care? Well, for one, they aren’t wasting your time while you sit with a phone pressed against your head listening to awful hold music for 15 minutes, they call you when they’re available. The other real benefit to it, is that they review your case and can take a look at what’s going on and come up with solutions before they call you.
Marketing is another area where there’s a rediscovered interest in genuineness. In Social Media if you aren’t being genuine folks will very quickly figure that out. Also, look at books like Speak Human, a whole guidebook on “outmarket[ing] larger firms by getting personal”, and being genuine goes right a long with being personal.
Now, traipsing across the internet we end up at The Art of Manliness. In their own words they are “a blog dedicated to uncovering the lost art of being a man.” I think this is another case of folks trying to build a certain amount of genuineness back into their lives. If you take a look at someoftheirposts, you’ll see that the core of being a man is being genuine and expressing your needs and wants, not cowing to some image of what you think the ideal man is–typically an over-sensitive people pleaser who’s afraid to say what he thinks.
So then, what am I getting at? Being genuine is not a self-improvement project that you’re going to start next year. It’s not some fad that a social media guru concocted. It’s not the newest way to curb ADD. It’s a way to live that enriches every aspect of your life.
You can’t always be right and nothing’s ever going to be perfect – embracing this is a huge competitive advantage. Shipping early and often lets you see how people are actually using your site and allows you to react accordingly.
Without a certain comfort level with ambiguity – an uncertain outcome – we would never experiment. If we never experimented, we would never make mistakes. And if we never made mistakes, we would never learn anything.
The best tool is the one you don’t notice. Why do you think pen and paper remain vastly popular for brainstorming? Because you don’t have to think about them. Pencils don’t crash.
That’s a great point. You can only learn about finishing by finishing. Until you say ‘I’m done’ and put it out there. Only then can you see what happens and learn from it. But if you never allow yourself to finish one piece, you’ll never get better at finishing them.
The real lesson for me is this: People want the basics done well. Does it look good, does it feel good, is it comfortable, is it clear, is it easy? No matter what you’re selling, those seem to be the things that really matter. Get those right and you’ve got a great shot at building a successful product and business.
Everyday, I read post after post and every now and again I find something that bears remembering. Sometimes, I’ll reflect on one of these posts and write about what it means for me or what it would sound like in my own words.
For the longest time I used an application called ShoveBox, which did a fine job. (If you haven’t seen it before, download the demo and just start dragging things into the menu bar icon, it’s addictive.) Lately, I’ve been itching for something that worked a little bit better. For example, the syncing between ShoveBox and it’s iPhone app was on the slow side and required that I’m on the same wireless network; not awful, but undesirable. Also, when you stored a website in ShoveBox it didn’t keep an archive of the content, just a reference to the page, so if you were offline or the site went down you were out of luck.
So after gnashing my teeth over switching from one tool to three, I decided to try using a combination of SimpleNote, Notational Velocity and Evernote. Here’s how I use the three applications side-by-side:
Evernote is for storing content that if the site went down tomorrow I would be very upset. Think of all of that great content that once was, that’s what goes into Evernote.
Notational Velocity and SimpleNote are for my thoughts, project notes and anything short term.
It’s all about using the right tool for the job. Evernote is like an attic—its great for storing stuff you’ll want to see later, but don’t need around all the time. Notational Velocity and SimpleNote are like your desktop with all of the stuff you need to think about stacked in a nice searchable pile.
We’ve ceded many of our remembering duties (birthdays, schedules, phone numbers, directions) to a hard drive in the cloud. And to a large extent, we’ve now handed over our memories of experiences to digital cameras.