Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Perfectionism

Build, Then Optimize

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Build, Then Optimize Startups often emphasize the importance of optimization, which can lead to significant gains, but only if your business is already functioning well.

Focusing on anything other than garnering interest for your product or service is pointless if no one is genuinely interested. Premature optimization wastes time and resources.

Idea for Impact: Get the basics right, then optimize. Prioritize getting the basics right before becoming fixated on optimization. In fact, avoid targeting incremental improvements when a step change is what you really need.

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Why Settle?

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We often believe we deserve so much better, but along the way, we settle. We settle for something not quite right.

It’s a choice we get to make every day. We settle one step at a time—because we don’t take the time to find “the one,” especially, or at least, only, when the stakes are big enough.

Yes, perfectionism is the enemy of ‘done.’ But not all perfectionism is detrimental … only obsessive, maladaptive perfectionism is. Haven’t our perfectionist efforts yielded the most good & satisfaction?

Idea for Impact: Learn to listen to your voice and live life on your own terms. Be very selective when pushing yourself to the max. Don’t settle for less than what you deserve, especially when your effort is wholly justified. Be more or less perfectionistic as required.

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Separate the Job of Creating and Improving

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You can’t write and edit, engrave and buff, or create and analyze simultaneously. If you try to do so, the editor will hinder the creator’s progress.

Don’t let the evaluator’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way of the maker’s creative process. Keep the niggling editor from creeping up during the initial draft.

Idea for Impact: In the early stages, the creator’s mind should be free from any judgment. Revising your way into a cut above is far more effective than trying to conjure brilliance out of thin air.

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  5. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’

The 5 Habits of Highly Organized People

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Discover the recipes to productivity and peace of mind by adopting the habits of highly organized people:

  1. Instead of obsessing over perfection, embrace imperfection. Remember the 80/20 Principle, and focus your A-level efforts on the most critical projects. Don’t stress about every minor detail that doesn’t require your attention.
  2. Start with small steps to declutter your space. Set aside time for short decluttering sessions, whether five minutes after lunch to tackle a messy Tupperware drawer or a 15-minute nightly kitchen tidy-up routine. These micro-habits can save you a lot of time on the weekends or during deep-cleaning days.
  3. Avoid problems by anticipating them in advance. Don’t wait until something becomes urgent to take action. Be proactive and plan for contingencies, such as bringing an umbrella on an overcast day. The best time to change is when you want to, not when you’re forced to.
  4. Develop a plan, commit to it, but also be willing to adjust it when necessary. Avoid excessive planning and rigidly sticking to a plan that may no longer work. Stay open to change and be flexible when circumstances require it.
  5. Drop unnecessary work. Examine rituals that can be improved or eliminated. Work with colleagues to streamline decision-making if your workplace has too many rules, approvals, and forms. Take a fresh look at things and find ways to simplify your work processes.

Bonus: Don’t touch anything twice. Put every object in its proper place. Don’t sit on decisions.

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  5. Mise En Place Your Life: How This Culinary Concept Can Boost Your Productivity

Book Summary of ‘Yeah, No. Not Happening’: Karen Karbo on Rejecting the Pursuit of Perfection’s Snare

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'Yeah No Not Happening' by Karen Karbo (ISBN 0062945548) Karen Karbo’s book Yeah, No. Not Happening (2020) is titled after a powerful mantra she uses to break free from the relentless pursuit of getting better. Karbo calls attention to a significant tragedy of our time: we spend most of our lives striving for self-improvement and setting ourselves up for failure when, in reality, we are often content just as we are.

We don’t need to constantly chase ambitious goals or sacrifice our inner peace for an unattainable ideal. It’s essential to allow ourselves a break—a deliberate act of self-care. While we naturally care for others out of responsibility, necessity, and habit, we overlook extending the same care to ourselves.

Karbo encourages us to embrace being okay rather than relentlessly pursuing an impossible perfection, even when we give our best effort. Being okay does not mean carrying regrets; it means being human, embracing every aspect of ourselves. In our flaws and scars, resilience blooms.

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  5. Thinking Straight in the Age of Overload // Book Summary of Daniel Levitin’s ‘The Organized Mind’

Mise En Place Your Life: How This Culinary Concept Can Boost Your Productivity

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“Mise en place” may sound like a highfalutin term, but it is a French phrase that means “set in place.” In the culinary world, it refers to the practice of preparing all ingredients and equipment in advance of cooking. This means tasks such as chopping vegetables, measuring ingredients, preheating ovens, and organizing equipment are taken care of before cooking begins. The benefit of this preparation is that cooks can concentrate entirely on cooking during service, free from the need to stop and gather or prepare ingredients. Mise en place is an essential aspect of professional cooking and symbolizes a well-organized and efficient kitchen.

When it comes to exceptional cooking, chefs take their craft seriously. Mise en place isn’t just a time-saving technique; it’s a way of life. Messing with it is like kicking a hornet’s nest, as Anthony Bourdain, the culinary world’s travel documentarian, underscored in his bestselling book, Kitchen Confidential (2000): “Mise en place is the religion of all good line cooks.” Everything from their station to their tools, supplies, and backups should be arranged with military precision, and disturbing this sacred set-up is like throwing the universe off balance. Things can quickly spiral out of control, and anyone in the restaurant is advised not to mess with a line cook’s “meez” unless they want to face their wrath!

The same concept can be applied to any project or task. Pre-planning and careful preparation reduce the risk of interruptions and distractions. Take time to plan ahead, gather the necessary resources, and know your goal before starting. Keep the mundane concerns from keeping you focused on the job you’re there to do.

Think of it as a personal mise en place. Sit down and plan out what you need to succeed, including the necessary skills, resources, and people. Doing so allows you to channel your full attention to the task at hand, avoiding distractions and increasing your overall effectiveness.

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  5. Thinking Straight in the Age of Overload // Book Summary of Daniel Levitin’s ‘The Organized Mind’

Why Your Hobbies Don’t Need to Be Perfect

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In a captivating op-ed, Columbia law professor Tim Wu explores how the pursuit of perfection has infiltrated and corrupted the realm of leisure.

If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following.

Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it … alien values like “the pursuit of excellence” have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur.

The demands of modern life and the pressure to be constantly productive have turned hobbies into serious endeavors. The pursuit of excellence, Wu argues, is at odds with true freedom and can lead to feelings of self-judgment and inadequacy. “Demanding excellence in all that we do steals from us one of life’s greatest rewards—the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy.”

Idea for Impact: Abandon the desire to excel and fully embrace the pure delight that hobbies bring. Let them be the sanctuary where the soul can sustain itself.

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How to … Stop That Inner Worrywart

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I’m one of those incessant worrywarts. Risk mitigation is a significant facet of my work. Thus, I worry about the prospect of non-optimal results; I worry about the unintended side effects of my decisions, and I worry about what people aren’t telling me. I even worry that I worry too much (now, that worry is entirely unfounded.)

If, like many people, you’d like to worry less, perhaps you may find the following approaches helpful. Most of my over-worrying comes from thinking ahead, but after a reasonable effort to understand risks and make plans to adapt more flexibly to developing situations, I’ll just let up. I’ll self-talk as though I’m addressing a team, “Not everything is within our control. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s deal with it as it appears and course-correct.” Beyond that, I’ll get really busy with something else that keeps me too occupied to fret about the previous thing that worried me.

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  5. Take this Quiz and Find Out if You’re a Perfectionist

Trying to Be Perfect is Where Your Troubles Begin

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Fear of failure is one of the insidious confidence killers. Instead of living life in a place of self-acceptance, many folks try to live up to unrealistic ideals. They’re on a continual treadmill, chasing the illusory feeling of urging on everything in their lives to be “perfect.”

When you cling to the all-or-nothing standard, all your endeavors result in perfection or failure. This mindset drives you to see yourself as a disappointment again and again.

Let go of dichotomy. You needn’t be “perfect or failure.” Don’t build yourself up to fail with the unattainable goal of always being perfect. Instead, set goals that are very achievable and within your control. Make your goal just to take action. Not to achieve a perfect outcome, not even to a positive outcome, but just to be done. Completed with a satisfactory result. Checked off.

Idea for Impact: You don’t have to give 110% or even 100% to everything you do. Be very selective about when you want to push yourself to the max—only when the stakes are big enough and when your perfectionism is thoroughly justified.

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Don’t Over-Deliver

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Many tasks in the workplace could be done with total adequacy and barely more.

Don’t get fixated on ensuring that every task is entirely done, every email edited and re-edited to get the grammar right, or every spreadsheet is flawless. This is a pointless pursuit.

Sure, you don’t want to be a careless hammerhead. But don’t waste time sweating the little stuff. There comes the point where any changes you make to whatever it is you’re working on no longer makes it better but just different. Identifying the inflection point of diminishing returns is one of the hardest skills to learn and one of the most necessary.

Don’t agonize over tiny improvements in your work and thwart yourself from achieving the actual goal of doing the work.

Idea for Impact: Most acceptable outcomes correlate with “good enough,” not “perfection.” Being consistently excellent is essentially a matter of fierce discipline—doing the essential things well.

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  4. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’
  5. The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’