Strive for Adequate aka The Curse of Excellence
Most of what you should be doing is adequate.
No more.
No less.
Adequate isn’t bad.
Adequate = sufficient.
And when you figure out the multitude of small things that can be done adquately rather than excellently, you’ll find (after some moments of soul-searching and standards-wrestling) that you’ll have more time on your hands.
Time you can put towards Great Work.
And Great Work is EXACTLY the sort of work you should be doing at a level of excellence.
Great Work matters, Great Work engages your heart and hands and mind.
The true cost of you holding to a standard of excellence in everything you do is that you do nothing truly excellently.
For you to say Yes to Great Work, you need to say No to “everything will be excellent.”
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Tags: adequate, excellence, Great Work
I agree, our business is called CoreXalance, excellence to the core, most of the time it is at great effort maintaining the standard. Braking down the work from this umbrella of excellence to the responsibility of just doing great work sounds like an excellent digestible idea!!
It’s a fantastic idea and one that requires some instruction to implement. When you are working in a culture where excellence is both demanded and expected in spite of an overwhelming volume of work, it is easy to become paralyzed. That’s where I am today and I really am striving to get “un-stuck.” SO…where do you start? I’d like to implement this throughout my entire department!
Juli
Great question. I’d start small - pick a task or a project and pick a person or a team who might be open to this. In other words - start doing this where it’s easiest. My guess would be trying to do this across a whole department is, as the saying goes, “trying to boil the ocean” - a miserable and almost impossible task.
Start small. See where you get to. And then do it again.
This certainly speaks to the strife for perfectionism by which many of us are plagued! I have misinterpreted these words - “Adequate” sounds so close to INadequate, and sufficient sounds, well, adequate without the beating. Thanks Michael, this one really hit home for me. And thanks to everyone else who posted on this article, too. Take care, DEB
If you’re a dedicated entrepreneur, then your “adequate” may very well be someone else’s idea of perfectly good work! I’ve found people are very satisfied with what I think is good, adequate, not bad, decent, ok stuff I’ve done… have gotten high praise about things I wish I could do 10x better! So, this is great advice as it allows you to accept the happiness of your clients and have more time to really put the wow factor into a GREAT project!
V-
My perfectionism gremlin has just come down with a case of vertigo. She’s swirling and about ready to throw up. How can you treat her this way after all the years she’s been here for you–yelling and screaming that you’re just not good enough yet. (Ever.) Pushing you harder to do better and to do more and to do more better. Now, you’ve given her a dose of reality. My my. The vertigo is slowing, now it seems to be going in one direction. Can it be? Hope, for the first time in a long time. It’s an adeuqate starting point. Thank you Michael, Box of Crayons.