On the Pitfalls of Perfectionism and the Triumphs of Failure
Sweet Bites for May 24, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
This week we explored perfection and mastery, part of our May theme on fulfillment (links below).
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Choose Your Dessert for the Week
🍰 Mini Bite # 1
On Perfection as the Enemy of Good
Steven Spielberg is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. A key to his prolific career is knowing when to say “let’s try again” and when to move on.
During the making of Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg called cut on a take and told the crew to start moving to the next spot. Matt Damon stopped him and asked, “Steven, uh, don’t you think we should have done a couple more takes?” They had spent the majority of the day setting up and practicing that scene after all.
Spielberg turned back around and said, “I could spend another hour on that scene and perhaps make it 10% better, or I can go do another shot—I am gonna go do the shot.”
Everything in life is a tradeoff. Learning what and when to perform the tradeoff is what separates beginners from masters.
🦉 Wisdom
“Life does not change, but the attitude you bring to it might. And this is not a trivial adjustment. In fact, it may be the only meaningful adjustment that is possible.”
John Kaag
Source: Hiking with Nietzsche
🍰 Mini Bite # 2
On Fast Failures
Many of us never begin in our pursuits because of a fear of failure. Failing hurts, and perfectionists have often been hurt by failure in the past which leads them to develop habits of “perfecting” in an effort to avoid pain.
Ed Catmull, the former President of Pixar, approached failure differently. “Failure,” he wrote, “when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth.”
We too often equate failing as something bad but in fact mistakes are so ingrained in human nature that without them, we’d never create anything new. As Catmull puts it, “They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable, without them, we’d have no originality).”
Andrew Stanton, the writer/director behind Finding Nemo, Wall-E, and A Bug’s Life, is famous at Pixar for telling people to “be wrong as fast as you can.”
This philosophy throws perfection out the window and is based on tackling the fear of failure upfront so you can fix what’s not working as quickly as possible.
As Catmull summarizes, “To be wrong as fast as you can is to sign up for aggressive, rapid learning… The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration.”
📚 This Week’s Newsletter
🍰 Mini Bite # 3
On Focusing on the Work, Not Peoples’ Opinions
Steve Jobs was a known perfectionist. He was extremely meticulous about everything that Apple did from the shape of the iPhone to the way the box opened.
Jony Ive who led the design team at Apple during Jobs’ tenure, once had a meeting with Jobs where he asked if Jobs could ease up a bit on the harsh criticisms he had been saying in front of the team. “Why?” Jobs asked. “Because I care about the team,” was Ive’s reply.
“No Jony, you’re just very vain. No, you just want people to like you. And I am surprised at you because I thought you really held the work up as the most important, not how you believed you were perceived by other people.”
Ive’s first reaction was the feeling of pain, but as he sat with the comment, he would see how it grew on him, how, when you are looking to achieve greatness at something, one needed to be honest and direct about what wasn’t working.
Could Jobs had said things differently in front of the team to keep morale high? Probably, but more than anything, he was stressing that in order to have a chance at making something great, you had to be brutally honest and not focus on what other’s thought.
It came down to whether or not the product being produced was the best it could be.
📰 Article
How to get over ‘never good enough’ by Margaret Rutherford (audio version also available)
If you struggle with perfectionism, or the emotional pulls of self-worth that are often tied to perfectionist tendencies, then this article is a great starting point.
Rutherford is a psychologist who outlines, in detail, the inner emotional struggles that cause perfectionism and steps on how to overcome the formed habits.
Favorite Passages/Quotes:
“Your beliefs likely influence the rules you set yourself. At the same time, the rules you follow can limit or expand your beliefs. For example, you might have the rule ‘I always put a smile on my face, no matter what.’ It’s connected with the belief ‘People won’t like me if I don’t smile.’”
—
“Think about a turtle. At any sign of danger, the turtle pulls its head back in and waits. Similarly, if you’re prone to destructive perfectionism born from a difficult past, it’s likely that you too tend to withdraw into whatever shell you can find when painful feelings get stirred up.”
—
“Remember you’re worth fighting for, not despite your imperfections, but because of them. You’re worth loving, not because of what you can do, but because of who you are.”
🍰 Mini Bite # 4
On Taking Risks for Growth
Many forget that Amazon as we know it today was not always a sure bet. In fact, when Amazon first started out, they did so selling nothing but books. But the company had a vision to be bigger and took risks on moonshot projects that included what became their biggest successes such as AWS and Alexa.
“Failure is an essential component of innovation and invention,” Bezos once said. “If you know it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. And so if you want to invent, if you want to innovate, failure is part and parcel with that, there’s no escape from that.”
When we hold onto a perfectionist mindset, when we are beholden to this golden standard, we do not give ourselves the flexibility to take risks, to fail and learn from it.
You beat this through changing your mind to make incremental progress. A small failure is recoverable, it does not crash the entire enterprise. Mapping out where you can afford to take risks and afford to fail is incremental to growing, to pushing yourself or the organization in new directions for flourishment and growth.
As Bezos says, “Take pride in your decisions and hard work.”
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
🛠️ Tactic
In our Monday Meditation, we discussed how President Dwight D. Eisenhower was very purposeful about delegation of work to better free himself up for the most important tasks.
Many today use Eisenhower’s methodology for working through priorities. Known as The Eisenhower Matrix, it is the process of separating one’s to-dos by level of importance and urgency.
![[Inline illustration] The four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix (infographic)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd400563-b512-4b40-b2fd-885ab0072768_1801x1847.webp "[Inline illustration] The four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix (infographic)")
Eisenhower was famous for saying that the important things often aren’t urgent and the urgent things usually aren’t important.
By having to sit down and map out one’s list and rank in order of importance, one quickly becomes aware of the things that need their attention and the things that do not.
Jony Ive once said Steve Jobs was the most focused person he’d ever met. What he learned from him was this:
“What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say ‘no’ to it because you’re focusing on something else.”
📖 Book Recommendation
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca the Younger
Perhaps one of the greatest essays of all time, Seneca details a mistake many of us make: handing our most valuable resource over to others. We so often focus on theft when it comes to personal property, but as Seneca says, we’re so willing to give away our most precious property—our time.
Favorite Quotes/Passages:
“How many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your losses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left to you.”
—
“Many pursue no fixed goal, but are tossed about in ever-changing designs by a fickleness which is shifting, inconstant and never satisfied with itself.”
—
“That is the feeling of many people: their desire for their work outlasts their ability to do it. They fight against their own bodily weakness, and they regard old age as a hardship on no other grounds than that it puts them on the shelf.”
🦉 Wisdom+
"Affective judgments are always about the self. They identify the state of the judge in relation to the object of judgment.”
Robert Wright
Source: Why Buddhism is True
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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