Perfectionism in Business - A Curse or a Blessing?

Many people who strive to better themselves or their businesses might be described as perfectionists.

However, how do you know if you're a perfectionist and is it a curse or a blessing for you and your business mindset?

They're the questions I'm looking to answer here, but to take this one step further I'm going to exercise one of the points I make in this very article.

See if you can guess what it is, but I'll reveal all at the end.


So, Are You a Perfectionist?

I was first described as a perfectionist by my primary school teacher when I was around 7 years old. Don't ask me how I remember this but for some reason it's stuck in my mind until this day.

If you're a perfectionist yourself you might have already realised long ago too.

Had I written this article and made some really bad spelling errors (which hopefully I haven't) would it have annoyed you or would it not have bothered you at all?

Those who send me emails pointing out my errors are probably perfectionists... or maybe they have too much free time, one or the other.

Spending far too much time and effort on detail which has very little impact on the results of your work is a sure sign of being a perfectionist.

For example, I might write an article like this in half an hour and it'll be good enough to publish. However, I'm always inclined to spend another hour on it to ensure it's as perfect as I can make it.

The impact of the extra hour I spend is in fact minimal so it's not always time well spent. As long as the content is useful and it's not a complete mess, people will be happy to read and learn something useful from it.


Is Perfectionism a Positive Characteristic?

In the last section we touched on a potential negative side of being a perfectionist. A perfectionist might spend three times as long on a piece of work and not see anything like three times the results.

So being a perfectionist can often lead to you being inefficient and not achieving anywhere near the productivity you could.

As a result you won't be managing your time efficiently and you won't see the results you're expecting.

For me, that's the negative side of being a perfectionist, but like most things it can be controlled and once you learn to do this you can turn it into a blessing rather than a curse.

By definition, perfectionists tend to produce better quality work, even though it takes much longer to do.

So if you can identify which tasks justify the extra effort then you can produce really good quality work which your customers will appreciate.

The difficult part is identifying which tasks you can just say "good enough is good enough", do only what's required and then move on to something else, knowing it's not perfect.

Trust me, for a perfectionist this is very difficult, but controlling your tendency to always strive for perfection allows you to turn it from a curse into an blessing.

Those who aren't perfectionists don't have this choice. They'll never understand the value of putting in the time and effort where it's justified and can have a real impact.

In my experience their work and their success will rarely reach the same standard as a perfectionist might achieve. Controlling your perfectionist tendencies is key though.

Controlling Perfectionism

I mentioned earlier that I'd exercise one of the principles in this very article itself. I'm kind of hoping it wasn't obvious what it was though.

What I've done is write this post with the "good enough is good enough" principle. Besides a simple spelling and grammar check I haven't been back and edited anything.

I'm sure the resulting article isn't up to my usual standard, but I hope it proves the case that it's still good enough and I didn't really need to spend that extra hour on it.