It seems way too common that people try to be perfect at something and forget to tally up the cost of achieving that level of perfection. If you're thinking, "hey I seem to remember reading an article like this here before" then you're right, except, creating your unique masterpiece was about focusing on what you shine at rather than on what others do.
This article is a different look at a similar topic! So read on.
Here's a personal story that I'd like to share. Last week, I posted a video regarding the power of commitment. I had spent a couple of hours recording the video and getting all the content ready for editing. Once I got to that point, I spent another "several" hours trying to do something so insignificant (in hind-sight) rather than accepting it as "good enough" and moving on.
While creating that video, I had recorded the audio separately as I had done in the past. So for me to start editing the video, I first needed to synchronize the video with the audio. The issue I had was that the audio would go out of sync within a few minutes no matter what I tried to do. What it came down to was that the sampling of the audio and the video were different and they would end up going adrift after a few minutes.
The cost of trying to synchronize the audio, and believe me, I tried SO many different things like exporting, importing, converting formats, shortening the video, different software for editing, you name it, was many wasted hours and several hours of lost sleep! I also ended up delaying my post by almost 4 days as other commitments got in the way!
As I was going to sleep late after a night of battling with this, I thought to myself, "what else can I do? I've tried everything to no avail..." and suddenly, it struck me. I HAD CREATED THIS PROBLEM MYSELF.
It all started with a microphone that a very kind friend had let me borrow. Because I had this high quality microphone, I insisted on using it since it sounds way better than the audio recorded through my iPhone. This is where the problem started. Because of this, I completely disregarded the fact that I had perfectly synchronized audio that was recorded through my iPhone (which is what I use for recording the video). The only fault it had was that it sounded a bit more "echoy" and a bit more "tinny".
So what would have been the impact of using the audio from my iPhone? My last video was watched 558 times at the time of this writing, of which, only about 12% watched the entire video. So of the 7 billion people in the world, and of the 558 of those that watched my last video, only 67 people watched the entire video!
So the impact of having less than ideal audio would have cost me very little in terms of video views in comparison to the LOSS OF SLEEP. Being a parent of 3 kids, that is working a full-time job, is starting a new coaching practice, and is enrolled in a very demanding coach training program, sleep is my number one commodity!! And to say that I traded it for trying to get better audio on my video sounds pretty silly (pardon the pun) in hind-sight of course!
The message that you should be getting out of this post is, figure out what "good enough" looks like for you. If you're a little torqued by the term "good enough" then this article was written for you as you're probably a perfectionist! Once you've defined what good enough looks like then do yourself a favour and STOP and DECLARE SUCCESS once you get there! The price you pay to get PERFECTION may be so high that you lose at the end! In fact, some people don't ever even start because they are afraid of not being able to do something perfectly!
If you remember one thing out of this post it should be that if you strive for perfection, you are limiting yourself to only being able to accept 100% as your definition of success. Everything else is a failure. Ultimately, you will end up feeling like you failed more often than not. You will also spend a lot of energy trying to get 100% and will likely fail just because of that. So don't let your imperfect perfection be your biggest failure that gets in the way of your next move!
As a way to show me practicing what I put out here, and because I am actively working on taming the perfectionist in me, I decided I would limit the amount of time for me to write this post by starting late Sunday night instead of Thursday/Friday when I would usually start, I did not seek any feedback from my wife as I usually would, and am calling it good enough and publishing it with whatever imperfections that it may have!
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