Any artist will tell you that the hardest part of creating is knowing when to walk away from. Painters will add a touch of color here and smear a bit there and before they know it they have a completely new piece that they aren’t satisfied with. The same goes for musicians, sculptors, book writers, and all of us making a living in the business world as well.
I learned this from building a coffee table for myself with dear friend Ryan Besand and he guided me along the way engineering the woodworking and helping make my vision come alive. Once the project got to a certain point, he warned that I’d need to decide when to walk away and not keep fiddling with it or I’ll take away from the original idea. At the time I was wary about not finishing off every little perfection and blemish, forgoing to sand off a few corners and add another layer of stain. But now that it’s over a year old and it gets used almost daily without defect, I know that he was spot on. I can’t even notice the imperfections I was concerned about a year ago and I love showing it off… I even wrote an entire blog post about it.
Learning to live with imperfections is a contentment that is hard to practice, but is a must if we want to churn out good work. This does not mean put sloppy work out there, rather don’t fall into the trap of spending hours and days fiddling with something that only a single person is going to notice. Focus in the beginning of a project translates to an early ship date if imperfections are limited, some call this measuring twice and cutting once.
Seth Godin has said, “Good is good enough” and Eric Reis preaches a “Minimally viable product” and Tim Ferriss references Pareto’s Law to learn 90% of something quickly and not even bother with the last 10% because it will take too long to learn. Yet we never hear about perfectionists in the ever-evolving world of business… It’s because they could never get their literary works ‘perfected’ to their point of shipment. The thought leaders we hear about today do not have a platform of perfect it before you ship it, they are of the mindset to ship early and ship often!
The most successful artists and the most successful business people aren’t always the brightest or the most talented, but we finish. And when we finish, we can start another, and another, and continue to build our businesses, galleries, empires, or whatever it is we’re striving for. Learn from our mistakes and don’t make the same ones twice. Know when to walk away and continue building, the real successes will learn from our prior shipments and become better and better at shipping with less imperfections.
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