Most of us have responsibilities in life where we need to get numerous things done. No matter who we are or what we do for a living, we have those obligations in one form or another. Many of us are working 9-5 in our office jobs while some of us are students studying for exams. Whatever it is that we do, we need to tackle different kinds of problems pretty much all the time to get ahead in life. It can be said that our responsibilities are mainly about designing solutions to tackle problems to progress ourselves forward. However, our tendency to perfect our work could really be time-consuming and prevent us from getting where we want to be.
In the age of social media, the obsession with being perfect is unsurprisingly common. We have a tendency to hide our flaws in order to appear perfect to gain validations from others. This exact mindset can get into other parts of life and interfere with our decision-making. We may have had experiences such as hiding our mediocre exam scores from our peers, refuse to talk about our failures or other similar experiences at some points in our life. Still, what we have to remind ourselves is that it is completely okay to not be perfect. In fact, being imperfect is part of the progress that helps you grow up and advance forward. Once you accept this reality it is very life-transforming as it makes you less afraid to try out new things that could bring fulfillment to your life.
An obsession with perfection is very common in every profession. I can say from my own personal experience as a software developer that we deal with problems all the time and we have a tendency to over-engineer our solution that only meant to solve a simple issue. Occasionally, we want to write code that is generalized and works with all scenarios but that “one-size-fits-all” concept could be overkill and unrealistic. The nature of programming itself is about making trade-offs. We sacrifice something in order to get something. Sometimes, we sacrifice performance for reliability. Sometimes, we write less code for conciseness. It is okay for your code to not do everything as long as it does what it supposed to do. You can’t have everything, and everything means nothing.
As a lover of aviation, I recently have found a good example of why a great thing doesn’t need to be perfect. It is about one of my favorite aircraft, The U-2 spy plane. It is one of the most widely-known reconnaissance aircraft during the cold war and has a very interesting history. What’s unique about this aircraft is that it doesn’t have enough landing gears to balance itself. It lacks landing-gears mounted on the wings like normal airplanes out there leaving with only one wheel on its belly. Instead, it has something called “Pogos” which is a set of wheels mounted on both sides of the wings but will be fallen after take-off and will be reattached again by ground crews after landing for the aircraft to taxi itself back to the parking. The reason that this plane was designed this way is to save weight for the long-endurance mission. Having a full set of landing gears is definitely not a priority.
U-2 is a well-designed airplane. Its engineering is superb. Its reputation during the cold-war is well renowned. Yet, it doesn’t even have a complete set of landing gears. It is evident that in order to achieve greatness, making trade-offs is inevitable. U-2 happens to be a good example of that. If the designer is still worrying about making perfect aircraft with landing gears like normal aircraft, there would not be a U-2 exist in this world.
Whatever it is that we do, it’s better to aim for achieving a goal instead of perfection. That also means the goal itself shouldn’t be about being perfect. As long as you are persistent enough in working your way toward your objective, that is already a success by itself. The most important parts would be about getting started, your perseverance, and your commitment to achieving your objective. Perfection is not a requirement and is way overrated.