“Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.”

Harriet Braiker

There is a difference between perfectionist and striving for excellence. A small teeny tiny difference. The difference is as small as night and day. Black and white. Heads and Tails. That’s right. Perfectionism and excellence are like the 2 sides of a coin. They never see each other eye to eye.

So what’s the difference?

Perfectionism is focused on “doing the thing ‘right’”. How it will appear to others. What will others think of it. It is a people pleasing attitude. And hence it is never ending in nature. Coz, we can never satisfy all the people all the time. And consequently, perfectionism is a never ending time consuming action. It never gets over.

Excellence on the other hand is doing the right thing. Right according to you. Best according to you in a given time frame. The pursuit of excellence keeps you focused on what matters and fills you with energy. There is no damage to self esteem, like that found in perfectionism. Perfectionism diminishes your productivity, your efficiency and effectiveness and worse still, damages your peace of heart and mind. On the other hand, productivity is built by the pursuit of excellence.

Often perfectionists will not complete things, not start things, or not even take things on at all, for fear of not being able to do it perfectly. Perfectionism often causes procrastination. Fear of being unable to deliver to some unachievable standard often causes them to completely avoid doing what needs to be done. Perfectionists are terrified of making a mistake, and consequently find themselves stressed, anxious, and desperately focused on not failing. They maintain unrealistic expectations of themselves and of others and will often micromanage, causing undue stress on themselves and others.

Excellence focuses your attention on what’s right and working well, rather than what’s not working – and this keeps your attention on the positives and how things could be even better. Excellence is limitless and progressive, since you can always reach for greater and greater excellence. Whereas perfection can never be achieved.

Success is really based on taking the right action and getting the feedback to improve and not on getting things totally right every time.

 

We generally use the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) to develop excellence. When you know that 20% of your effort will produce 80% of your results. This makes you do 5 80% result oriented things instead of 1 never ending result oriented thing. Achieving 5 things to an excellent level will lead to greater success than doing 1 thing perfectly. 

Understand the damage that perfectionism does, and the benefits of aiming for excellence, then ask yourself where perfectionism has taken hold in your life or business. It might be a trait of yourself, a partner, a child or an employee. Deal with it at all levels, and nurture an ethos of excellence instead. Accept that nobody’s perfect. Accept that excellence is a process and a direction, rather than an end point.

So remember – you don’t have to always do things right – as long as you always do the right thing. Life is much more rewarding and enjoyable this way!