Perfectionism Kills

Surely, at some point in your career, you’ve at least heard of that dreaded Human Resources interview question, “What’s your biggest weakness?” It’s a terrible question. It almost guarantees the interview subject will lie. And since anyone who asks it surely must know that, it diminishes people on both sides of the desk. Most of us think we know the “right” answer instinctively. “I’m a perfectionist.” It’s a weakness that comes across as a strength.

Professional psychologists know better. “Psychologists see perfectionism almost always as a handicap,” writes Adrian Furnham at Psychology Today. “They see perfectionists as vulnerable to distress, often haunted by a chronic sense of failure; indecisiveness and its close companion procrastination; and shame.”

Perfection is phantasmagorical. William Shakespeare still has his critics. So do Frank Lloyd Wright, Stanley Kubrick, J.K. Rowling and every other world famous master of his or her craft that you can think of. You won’t escape it either. Sorry.

But your productivity can crash along with your emotional state if you don’t get a grip on it. You’ll run into diminishing returns in the early stages of polishing your work to “perfection,” and you’ll eventually run into negative returns and end up hurting yourself.

Here’s an extreme real-world example:

A client of mine hired me to edit and independently publish a non-fiction book on Amazon.com. It took me a week or so to edit his book. It should have taken me another week or so at the most to turn his manuscript into an e-book and to design the trade paperback edition. He was so obsessed with the layout, though—with the font sizes, spacing before and after sub-headings, the position of his text boxes, the look of his chapter title pages, etc., that he had me fiddle with it on and off for more than six months. The final version was no better or worse than the first—it was just different. And he still wasn’t happy. He finally relented and sent me an email, saying he realized it was better to publish an imperfect book that to publish no book at all.

If only he’d figured that out six months earlier. He blew his own artificially imposed deadline and told me he lost thousands of potential sales at a conference he attended because his book wasn’t available yet. His bill was also sky-high when I finally invoiced him.

Most perfectionists don’t hurt themselves as badly as he did. Most perfectionists have employers who won’t let them delay their deliverables for the better part of a year. They still waste plenty of time, though, and their final work products aren’t much better—if they’re even better at all—after burning up so much angst.

This isn’t an argument for producing sloppy work. No one should ever produce sloppy work. Just don’t make the perfect (which doesn’t exist) the enemy of the good. Because if you do, your productivity is certain to crater and you’ll drive yourself crazy. Perfectionism isn’t a strength disguised as a weakness. It’s a genuine weakness that, in its extreme form, can be debilitating.

Enough With the Social Media Spamming

Let’s get something straight here. You will instantly tarnish your social media reputation—or at the very least annoy hundreds if not thousands of people—if you send everyone who follows you on Twitter a boilerplate pitch for your services.

Everyone who follows advertising, marketing and digital content specialists on Twitter has experienced this. “Thanks for the follow!” reads a typical message. “To get our free e-book on the latest SEO strategies, sign up for our weekly newsletter. No spam, we promise.”

That is almost word-for-word a message we received last week after following what appeared to be an interesting Twitter feed. The sender broke the no-spam promise right there in the message. Because make no mistake. An automatic Twitter message to every one of your followers is considered spam by just about everybody who reads it.

All of us who manage social media accounts in the marketing and advertising business routinely encounters this. Bruce Weinstein at Forbes says he immediately removes his connections with everybody who does it. He quotes Phil Gerbyshak, Vengreso.com’s chief digital officer. “Connect first, pitch last. Instead of pitching me, find me on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, and comment genuinely on something I’ve shared or commented on not super recently via email. Offer a real insight or even disagree respectfully with me.”

Most of us have established relationships of some kind with people we first met on the Internet. Sometimes they become clients, other times employers or employees. They often become friends, and once in a while, they become spouses. Virtually none of these initially web-based relationships begin with some kind of a spam message.

No one is interested in hiring the first individual or company who spams them on social media. Feel free to promote your business, your services and your e-books on the Internet. Some of us might even be interested, but, if we are, our interest will be ignited organically. If you want to establish a business relationship with someone, start by interacting with them online like a real human being. It’s more time consuming, sure, but it’s also authentic and is far more likely to lead somewhere productive.