A new fashion is bagging around…
Recently I learned that there is a new fashion trend taking over. Baggy clothes being more popular and attractive than skinny & slim fit ones. Being that teenager who hated skinny jeans but eventually learned to like them, it feels like a grand betrayal. But like most things, there’s a cyclical nature to fashion.
Either way, I won’t be following on this trend apart from where I already was (baggy tracksuits for the win). Not because I don’t like this new trend, but because I believe that my fashion is now to a good enough level that spending time on changing it is not efficient.
If your fashion is currently not great though, and the baggy look really is the new thing in town for the foreseeable future, then it may be worth investing into the new style.
Life is never about perfection
Life is not about perfection – it’s about a continuous series of good enough’s. That is because perfection does not exist. As soon as you get close to what you believed would be perfection, you realise that you can become even better, improve even more.
Think of tennis players. They can become the top ranked player, win all grand slams and achieve all their old dreams. But every time they get close to achieving a dream, they get new ones. It’s no longer be ‘top ranked player’, it becomes ‘win the most grand slams’ or ‘stay ranked number 1 for the longest period’. It is an endless spiral.
Perfection leads to procrastination and becomes synonymous with fear, even if we don’t want to admit it. For example, not releasing your product for your new business until it is perfect. Is the procrastination because you are a perfectionist, or because you fear that unless it is perfect people will not want it? Either way, good enough will give you the answer much quicker and allow you to deal with the consequences, good or bad.
Some people do go the other way too. I used to not care about fashion at all. The truth was that it was never fashion that I didn’t like. It was the time and money you had to spend to get things that I liked. So I made a simple system – I made notes of the clothes and shoes that I needed to make the outfit combinations that looked good and then I set up alerts for sales on shops that had these items.
Is it perfect? No. But it is good enough and gets rid of the procrastination culprit which is I don’t like shopping.
Lets go back to playing tennis. Would you rather a player spend all their time training to have the perfect serve, the best in the game, or spend the majority of their time on the thing that was causing them to lose matches the most? It’s an exaggerated question, but the point remains. Chasing perfection slows down your results. Significantly.
How do you know what good enough is?
It’s an art rather than a science and self-evaluation is critical. If improving one area is becoming a bottleneck to the overall goal, then it is good enough.
Imagine you have a product and it’s not perfect. You want to add one more feature to it so that it can be used by another group of people as well, but this feature is turning out be extremely painful and costly to add. You can either release the product now and get most people that need it to buy it, or you can potentially spend lots of money and time on this final feature to find out that people didn’t actually care for it. Or maybe you take so long to release your product that a competitor releases it first and gains the majority of the market share.
One way to look at it is that if you rarely get negative feedback, it means that you are probably trying to be too perfect at whatever it is. Sometimes that may be a good thing, but most of the times it means you spent too much time or money on the wrong thing.
Life is better imperfec.
