To what extent should people aim for perfection at work and in their careers? When is “good enough” an acceptable goal? How can people make a distinction between the two?
I think we need to define what perfection is to better understand if this can be really applied in the workplace or our Careers. There are a few definitions out there but the most common is ‘ the state or quality of being or becoming perfect.
Perfect is being entirely without fault or defect: flawless, in a career sense ‘satisfying all requirements accurately’. In the real world, to have ‘Somewhat Perfect career’ one would have learnt from mistakes along the way. I do not necessarily think there is such a thing as ‘perfect career’. As humans living and working in an ever changing environment, there are just too many variables that could and can interrupt the state of perfection.
You can be a perfectionist in your work by simply identifying what can be realistically achieved and acknowledging that its good enough. So, in other words, you can set the parameters for perfection. Without boundaries, aiming for excellence, perfectionism can eventually lead to burnout and breakdowns as we commonly see. A key difference between unhealthy perfectionism and healthy determination is being able to define realistic expectations and being able to say, “that’s good enough, we can move on.”
I had the opportunity to read an article about 77 Perfectionists At Work . This takes perfectionism to another level.
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