My previous musings on perfectionism were philosophical. Now, I will stir some psychological flavours into the soup.
How can we both escape the toll of perfectionsim and avoid the subpar?
Adam Grant suggests that the first step is to set precise and challenging goals:
The ideal foil for perfectionism is an objective that’s precise and challenging. It focuses your attention on the most important actions and tells you when enough is enough.
Let’s see how to apply it to practice. Recently, a friend told me about a research project. They proposed something no one has done before, and it worked reasonably. However, it did not meet their goals of reaching performance level X.
The goal was precise and challenging, but perfectionism was still lurking. What was missing then? Note that the results did not meet expectations. With the reference frame of a perfectionist, precise goals turned into the impossible. Adam Grant has a suggestion for what mindset to adopt; you should be:
pleased, but not satisfied1.
This is especially hard after finishing school, where grades make us believe that perfection is attainable. In research, you will end up with more questions than answers. Thus, lack of satisfaction is inevitable; trying to answer everything would lead to an infinite loop. The idea is to flip the script and frame this as motivation to continue the work. After shipping your results. Putting your work out in the world is hard. People might judge you, which can be frightening. You can write for the drawer, as Franz Kafka did. But why would you?
I have two reasons to ship when you moved past pleasure on your path but did not arrive at satisfaction. First, what you do is not unique when treated over a longer temporal or spatial horizon. Someone else probably is also working on the same problem. In the history of science, this has happened with the dynamo, calculus, and the crossbow - the phenomenon even has its own Wikipedia page! So, even if you are convinced your idea does not work, sharing it can spare other people’s time. There is no list of multiple failures, but we can bet there could be. Tying success rigidly to a single number can be counterproductive (have you ever heard about p-hacking?). With a simplification, a project is the sum of idea and execution. Unsatisfactory execution does not imply a bad idea.
Second, scientific progress happens one small step at a time. Figuring out what does not work is also an inevitable part of the process2. In the puzzle of Nature (not the journal), the glue counts too. And the glue can be your not-working-that-well idea if you let others build upon it.
Make it solid, give your best, and then hit that button to publish. Even the graveyard of ideas is useful, providing fertile soil for the next seed.\
Think about
When you are weighing your success, do you entangle the quality of your idea from its implementation?
Do you have a reference point for defining a reasonable but challenging goal?
Dig deeper
Adam Grant On Hidden Potential And Measuring Yourself Against Yourself
I think about being pleased as having given all my best. Alternatively, being pleased requires a loud “Yes!” for the question: If this is the only thing someone would see from me, would I be OK with that?
Fortunately, science is shifting towards accepting negative results. See, e.g., the “I can’t believe it’s not better!” workshop at one of the flagship AI conferences