Do you go for perfect or good enough when producing your work? Do you go for perfect or interesting when selecting job candidates or companies with whom to do business? Seth Godin inspires this thought today. He wrote about Perfect vs. interesting.
[Perfection is boring.] Or you can be the person or the organization that's interesting. The thing about being interesting, making a ruckus, creating remarkable products and being magnetic is that you only have to be that way once in a while. No one is expected to be interesting all the time.
When I saw this link tweeted, my first reaction was the idea of "perfect vs. good enough." Perfectionists (me, sometimes) spend all their time making it right while never delivering. On the other hand, delivering something that is "good enough" actually gets something done and in the hands of the people who need it. It may not be perfect, but they are probably the best ones to tell you that.
Another aspect of this is in the job hunt - which is still happening for me. And I can look at it both from my perspective and that of the hiring organizations. Do I limit myself to the job descriptions and organizations which seem to be a perfect match? That is certainly the way through the door when the only filter is resume scanners that look for very specific qualifications. Unfortunately, these are few and far between, so I have to go for the "good enough" matches. But, to Godin's point, I would much rather go with the interesting organizations that happen to be doing close to what I would like to do. Finding those is just a little tougher, as they seem to be smaller firms or small groups within larger organizations.
And I recognize that hiring managers have the same struggle. Do they hire someone who fits the explicit parameters of the job? Or do they look for people who will fit into the DNA of the organizations? (Does the organization acknowledge that it has a "DNA" into which people fit?)
[Photo: "The good enough mine" by Kate Ure]