The pursuit of perfection can be perilous, leading to stress and unrealistic expectations. Striving for absolute 100% may cause plans to crumble under pressure, exemplified by the 'Wheaties effect' in sports. Embracing flexibility and building redundancy into your systems can foster resilience. This approach allows for better adaptation to unexpected changes, making goals more achievable. Ultimately, avoiding the trap of perfectionism paves the way for healthier progress and sustainable outcomes.
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insights INSIGHT
Perfection Is Fragile and Costly
Perfection is a fragile, unsustainable outlier requiring exorbitant effort.
Often, it demands an exponential or impossible investment approaching infinity.
question_answer ANECDOTE
The Wheaties Effect Explained
The "Wheaties effect" shows extraordinary performance tends to regress next season.
Perfection as an outlier is unlikely to be sustained over time.
insights INSIGHT
Perfection Sets You Up To Quit
Perfect commitments often cause people to quit when they fail once.
Designing goals for outlier perfection leads to fragile, short-lived efforts.
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This episode discusses why perfection is a dangerous and fragile goal, explaining how striving for 100% leads to unsustainable outlier states. It highlights how setting perfection as a bar can cause commitments to break and plans to fail due to a lack of slack, and offers strategies like building redundancy and planning with slack to achieve goals more effectively without relying on perfection.
Uncover why perfection is a dangerous and fragile goal, as it often requires exorbitant, unsustainable effort and creates outlier states that are unlikely to be maintained, referencing the "Wedies effect" where things tend to regress to the mean.
Learn how planning for 100% utilisation or setting perfection as a commitment can lead to fragility, causing plans to fail when unexpected changes occur or leading to giving up altogether once a "perfect" streak is broken.
Discover practical strategies to avoid fragile perfectionism, such as planning with slack to accommodate change and building redundancy into your systems and personal commitments for more robust outcomes.
Explore why actively avoiding requirements or expectations of perfection is crucial, as investing in it can be an exponential or even asymptotic step, leading to an unsustainable and fragile state.
Note: sorry about the plane noise in the background. I decided to publish it, since it's imperfect (and that's kind of making the point!).
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