Imperfectionism

I think you don’t see true change coming. If you can predict it, even if it’s big, it’s not a “real” change. In my experience, real change it’s very rare.

From science to software engineering

For instance, since I was a kid I thought I would be a scientist. The way I saw it, science was the noblest enterprise of humanity, the best way of giving value back to society. I went to high school and to college and then to work as a professional scientist, always maintaining that very same belief. Hence, even though my life changed a lot through all these stages, it wasn’t “real” change, because it was all predictably part of the same plan.

However, a couple of years into working in a research center I had a crisis. I remember it was around lunchtime. I felt a sudden need to walk away, like literally. I left the Cuban Neuroscience Center and started walking aimlessly in big circles for like two hours. By the time I returned I was certain that science was not my thing anymore. Of course, this crisis was the result of months and months of feeling empty inside. It didn’t come out of the blue, but, until that critical moment, “real” change hadn’t happened, since I was still holding onto my childhood beliefs.

Fun fact is, I didn’t have a clue what was going to replace science. Crazily enough, for a while, I thought I would become a fiction writer. I pursued that path for a few months, but lost motivation. Then I remembered programming. Since college, I really enjoyed all programming assignments and actually my thesis was about a purely computational problem. I though giving programming a try and that was it. Years later I’m totally happy with the choice. Turns out that programming fits my personality very well, not only my strengths, but even many of my weaknesses (like having an urge to double-check things) are actually good for programming.

The core of this change is that you need to regularly enjoy whatever you do for a living, instead of pursuing a grandiose idea that is supposed to be “the best for humanity”.

From perfectionism to imperfectionism

Lately a “real” change it’s happening to me again.

You see, I always thought the hallmark of a real professional was to do their best effort all the time. You had to be fully present and give your 100% to the current problem, to create the most beautiful, elegant and effective solution you could. Of course, through training and experience the quality of the solutions you could provide, and the complexity of the problems you could tackle would grow, but the ethos, the spirit of a “real artist” had to mean to always give your best.

You might call this approach “maximizing” or “perfectionism”. Certainly, I didn’t think you could apply it to everything, I thought you should separate the things that would really matter to you, the things that would define your identity (like software engineering in my case), and for the rest, just try to do good enough to keep things rolling.

However, there’s another measure of your productivity as a professional: the total value you can generate. For instance, let’s say you have 1 hour to do some work. Let’s say that over that hour, you could either solve 1 problem with the best, most elegant, most future-proof solution, or you could solve 3 problems with just good enough solutions. Now, in some cases, providing a single high quality solution would be the highest value proposition, for instance, if this solution was critical, and many things depended on it, but in many other situations, is more valuable to solve 3 problems that are blocking other stuff from getting done.

This math had escaped my analyses somehow until now. It’s so obvious, that now I feel very stupid of not having realized before, but that’s ok, feeling stupid is the best indicator of learning, and I love learning, so I love feeling stupid.

In conclusion, the way I see it now, a great professional or “artist” will wisely decide when to do things at the highest level or “just good enough” to get more stuff done. The word that came to my mind when I had this realization was “imperfectionism”. When I started writing this article I googled the term, and it turns out (surprise, surprise) I didn’t invent it. There are many blog posts and even some books about it.

Perfectionism and the fixed mindset

Why did it take me so long to discover imperfectionism and its ultra basic math?

I think one of the main reasons may be the “fixed mindset”. In her awesome book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck wonders:

What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?

If you think your essential qualities can be developed, you subscribe to the “growth mindset”, and if you think they are fundamentally stable, you subscribe to the “fixed mindset”. The consequences, as Dweck’s research suggests, of believing one or the other mindset are huge. Over the long run, the growth mindset gives you much more chances to… well… grow.

The problem is, we live in a fixed-mindset-infected world. I have tried to beat it out of my mind, but I know it’s still holding there. I don’t even know where it came from, must have been from my early age education, probably from my family or school.

In the fixed mindset, you have to prove yourself all the time. If you do poorly, you might be a low capacity person, and, since your capacity is fixed, that’s game over. That’s why fixed mindset people tend to avoid challenges and ambiguous situations where they are likely to fail, even if the upside is huge.

Hence, for fixed mindset people, it makes more sense to be a perfectionist, because, if you can do one perfect thing, that’s a reassuring proof that you are a high capacity person. If you do things just good enough, people might start thinking your talent is limited.

So, probably my blindness to the basic math of imperfectionism is yet another manifestation of the fixed mindset.

Perfectionism in decision-making

To me, it has always been very hard to make decisions. I would analyze multiple scenarios, go to excruciating detail, and agonize over the uncertainty even for unimportant things. I was following the same kind of perfectionist logic: “the hallmark of a wise decision maker is to make great decisions”. It escaped to me that making these “great” decisions consumed time and mental energy that wouldn’t be available to other more important activities.

One trick of decision-making by the way is that low-value decisions, where the options are very balanced or unimportant in a way that picking randomly is almost as good as deciding, can be harder to make optimally than high-value decisions, where picking the good option is critical. So, basically I was wasting dollars trying to save pennies.

Recently, thanks to my foray into imperfectionism, I have reconciled myself and started to enjoy decision-making a bit more. I’m learning to separate high-value from low-value decisions and invest less time in the latter by quickly picking the option that looks better.

Minimalism vs Imperfectionism

I love minimalism.

Minimalism motto is “less but better”. Imperfectionism’s motto is “worse but more”. Both seem opposite, but I think they aren’t. That’s because they are mental models. Mental models are applicable to a range of situations. If you try to apply them to every situation, they become dogma, and lose their effectiveness.

We can combine minimalism with imperfectionism by fully removing stuff that don’t add enough value to our lives (minimalism), and then on top of that, for the things that add enough value but only require to be good enough, do them in an imperfect way, so we can get more of them done (imperfectionism).

Moreover, imperfectionism is not even incompatible with perfectionism. Some situations really call for doing your very best. You just need to know when to apply each of these mental models, and they can all be useful.

Summary: the problems of perfectionism

1. It’s not always clear what is “the best”

Sometimes the situations are so uncertain and so confusing that it’s very hard to know what is perfect. So, even if you had all the time and resources in the world you wouldn’t know in which direction to apply them. Perfectionism doesn’t adapt very well to these situations.

2. It prevents you from getting started and experimenting

You gain more knowledge from trying out ideas, getting your stuff out in the world to get feedback and iterate over the solutions, than you might gain from perfecting the ideas in your head. Perfectionism might slow down this process. If launching the perfect solution is overwhelmingly difficult, it might entirely prevent experimentation.

3. It suffers from diminishing returns

Even if the situation is certain, and you know how to apply time and resources to make a solution as perfect as possible, after some point you don’t get enough bang for your buck. For instance, moving from 99% to 99.5% perfect might take a lot of work and bring very little extra value. You need to judge where the point of diminishing returns lies by also considering the opportunity cost, that’s it, all the other things you might be doing with the time and resources needed to make this solution just a little more perfect.