Perfectionists!

J

JOhnH

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
May 20, 2009
Messages
15,163
Location
Florida
Display Name
Right Seater
Home Airfield
KOMN
When people refer to themselves as "a perfectionist", are they bragging? Or just admitting that they are annoying?

Yes, I want my doctor and my A&P to be perfectionists, but outside of specialists, those who claim to be perfectionists are just annoying.
 
JOhnH said:
When people refer to themselves as "a perfectionist", are they bragging? Or just admitting that they are annoying?

Yes, I want my doctor and my A&P to be perfectionists, but outside of specialists, those who claim to be perfectionists are just annoying.
Click to expand...
It depends. When I say it, it tends to be when someone is wondering why I am still fussing over something "good" and I am usually very apologetic as most of what I expect myself to be perfect at does not require or warrant such levels of fuss. It is not a habit I am particularly proud of in most cases, but I can either get it done right or spend the next four years wishing I'd done it better when I could.
 
Ed Haywood said:
Not really. You want them to be consistently good enough.
Click to expand...
This

If you are a perfectionist then you won’t ever finish a project because it’s never perfect. Consistently good is already very good.
 
JOhnH said:
When people refer to themselves as "a perfectionist", are they bragging? Or just admitting that they are annoying?

Yes, I want my doctor and my A&P to be perfectionists, but outside of specialists, those who claim to be perfectionists are just annoying.
Click to expand...
Most of the perfectionists I know are artists.
Authors will rewrite passages dozens of times in their books, iterating on it for months or years.
Painters will attempt to paint the same feature a half dozen times (or more) until they get it right.
Musicians will practice the guitar, violin or cello until they can play it almost flawlessly, without hardly any perceptible imperfections.

Those are the kind of perfectionists I'm grateful for, it makes the art a lot more enjoyable. If authors/painters/sculptors/musicians aimed for "good enough," art would be a bit more dull.

But I'd argue that for most professions you want to be a perfectionists only until: marginal cost == marginal return (for the customer). Especially anything in the engineering side of things. I'm not going to pay 5x as much for an overengineered, perfect widget if someone else can get something that functionally does the same thing for a fraction of the price.
 
I’m not a perfectionist when it comes to other people. That’s just a great way to make them hate you. With some of my own activities, I do want to achieve perfection - flying, riding, shooting. I’ll never have a perfect flight or ride, but push to do so every time out. (And I have a standing order - if I ever put the plane away and say, “self, that flight was perfect - everything was 100% right”, then it’s time to quit because I have completely lost SA and am dangerous.) But for most things I do, somewhere between good and better than last time is acceptable.
 
A few years ago, some of us guys were trying to shoot an empty shotgun shell off of a nail on the side of a run-down shed with a .22 rifle. We kept missing. My wife, who had never shot a gun in her life, asked to try it and sure enough, she hit the target. One of the guys said, "I want to see that again." She handed him the rifle and said, "Why, I have nothing to prove."
 
Every reply here is appropriate and I agree.

What brought on my question was that my wife refinished a small table. A neighbor lady looked at it and said, "very nice. But if it were me I would have sanded down that little paint drip and done it over. But that's just me. I'm a perfectionist".

My question wasn't about people "being" a perfectionist. It was about people that call themselves perfectionists", especially when comparing themselves to others.

I, on the other hand, have a sign that says "I had a dream that my desk was perfectly organized".
 
I guess it depends on the context. A seller trying to brag, annoying. An expectation of a business or a service, justified.
 
JOhnH said:
What brought on my question was that my wife refinished a small table. A neighbor lady looked at it and said, "very nice. But if it were me I would have sanded down that little paint drip and done it over. But that's just me. I'm a perfectionist".
Click to expand...
That's less of a perfectionist, and more of a person providing not-so-veiled criticism of the work. In small doses, people like that are fine. In large doses, they're insufferable.
 
I have to be careful of that. When it comes to some things, I'm a perfectionist. When I get a CFI, like for my IR, I have to let them know. If I'm not careful, it leads to a lot of frustration on my part when I'm trying to hold tolerances that I can't do, and don't have to do. But I still aim for that perfection. I have to tell myself that sometimes good enough is good enough. Don't NOT try for perfection, and don't settle for less, but understand that it might be an impossible task.
 
I think I'll start telling people that I am perfectly adequate.
 
If I charge $500 for something chances are I'll be less of a perfectionist than if I charge $50,000.
Same if I'm the one paying.

If you spend double the time/material/effort to fix something almost nobody will ever see (blemish on the underside of a coffee table, for example), then you might qualify as a perfectionist.

Most people are just nitpickers.
 
JOhnH said:
When people refer to themselves as "a perfectionist", are they bragging? Or just admitting that they are annoying?

Yes, I want my doctor and my A&P to be perfectionists, but outside of specialists, those who claim to be perfectionists are just annoying.
Click to expand...
You really want an AP mechanic working on a 50 year old airplane to be a perfectionist? The airplane wasn’t perfect the day it came off the assembly line.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
But I'd argue that for most professions you want to be a perfectionists only until: marginal cost == marginal return (for the customer). Especially anything in the engineering side of things. I'm not going to pay 5x as much for an overengineered, perfect widget if someone else can get something that functionally does the same thing for a fraction of the price.
Click to expand...
Counterpoint: There is nothing I hate more than doing the same work all over again because it was done "cheap" the first time.

My most hated saying is "Perfect is the enemy of good enough." And I'm not a perfectionist. "Good enough" is the enemy of "great". It's even the enemy of "good".

There are many times, when engineering something, where just taking the time to think about what v2 and v3 might look like gives you a v1 that might cost maybe 10% more, but v2 and v3 will cost 50% less, each. And that's just the actual cost of the product - v2 and v3 will save even more when you don't have to recruit new engineers because the ones that worked on v1 run screaming into the woods in frustration because they have to re-do things they already did. Engineers are trained to make things only as expensive as necessary, but half-assing things is making things "cheaper" than necessary too, because in the long run it will cost you.

Or maybe I'm just too loyal to my employers and should just start leaving after v1.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Counterpoint: There is nothing I hate more than doing the same work all over again because it was done "cheap" the first time.

My most hated saying is "Perfect is the enemy of good enough." And I'm not a perfectionist. "Good enough" is the enemy of "great". It's even the enemy of "good".

There are many times, when engineering something, where just taking the time to think about what v2 and v3 might look like gives you a v1 that might cost maybe 10% more, but v2 and v3 will cost 50% less, each. And that's just the actual cost of the product - v2 and v3 will save even more when you don't have to recruit new engineers because the ones that worked on v1 run screaming into the woods in frustration because they have to re-do things they already did. Engineers are trained to make things only as expensive as necessary, but half-assing things is making things "cheaper" than necessary too, because in the long run it will cost you.

Or maybe I'm just too loyal to my employers and should just start leaving after v1.
Click to expand...
If you expect to have to maintain your item, or foresee being required to add to it over time then it makes sense (in many cases) to put in the extra 10-20% to do it in a way where it's easier to work on later. Or setting it up in such a way that further required work is unlikely.
Or if it's just something you see having to run over and over and over again, it makes sense to "do it right" the first time so each incremental time it's easy. But I'd argue that still conforms to the rule of abiding by marginal cost == marginal return, because that return will still be realized, just deferred.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
If you expect to have to maintain your item, or foresee being required to add to it over time then it makes sense (in many cases) to put in the extra 10-20% to do it in a way where it's easier to work on later. Or setting it up in such a way that further required work is unlikely.
Or if it's just something you see having to run over and over and over again, it makes sense to "do it right" the first time so each incremental time it's easy. But I'd argue that still conforms to the rule of abiding by marginal cost == marginal return, because that return will still be realized, just deferred.
Click to expand...
Sadly, there are enough shortsighted managers in the world that don't want the deferred return, they want the return RIGHT NOW and then they leave and go screw up another company and they're not around to clean up the mess they caused.

In fact, the stock market tends to promote that behavior on the part of publicly traded companies - It's always about the next quarterly results.
 
Dad has more than a touch of perfectionism. His house flooded 3 years ago. He hired a drywall crew. Went to school with the guys daughter. His wife and my mom are best friends. Allegedly does great work. I saw imperfections. Would have been annoyed. But Id have lived with it. Some of it has to do with the underlying framing.

Dad was so annoyed he spent 3 months going over everything himself. Then decided he cant trust any tile guys so he tiled the kitchen,foyer, and bathroom himself. Then came the cabinets. And that's when he realized where the drywall and cabinet met wasn't perfect. So he mudded that up all over again.

His house was never fully completed after nearly 40 years. 3 years after the upstairs toilet line flooded that bathroom and his bedroom and everything below it down to the basement. He's still living in my sister's old bedroom. He absolutely refuses to hire anyone because it won't be "how he wants it".

Perfectionist or anal retentive?

When he shoots his bow, he'll pace out 40 yards. But then he'll bust out the range finder and take half a step and 3 minutes to confirm. Dude, do you want me to tell the animal to move back 6 inches?
 
Last edited:
Racerx said:
Dad has more than a touch of perfectionism. His house flooded 3 years ago. He hired a drywall crew. Went to school with the guys daughter. His wife and my mom are best friends. Allegedly does great work. I saw imperfections. Would have been annoyed. But Id have lived with it. Some of it has to do with the underlying framing.

Dad was so annoyed he spent 3 months going over everything himself. Then decided he cant trust any tile guys so he tiled the kitchen,foyer, and bathroom himself. Then came the cabinets. And that's when he realized where the drywall and cabinet met wasn't perfect. So he mudded that up all over again.

His house was never fully completed after nearly 40 years. 3 years after the upstairs toilet line flooded that bathroom and his bedroom and everything below it down to the basement. He's still living in my sister's old bedroom. He absolutely refuses to hire anyone because it won't be "how he wants it".

Perfectionist or anal retentive?

When he shoots his bow, he'll pace out 40 yards. But then he'll bust out the range finder and take half a step and 3 minutes to confirm. Dude, do you want me to tell the animal to move back 6 inches?
Click to expand...
My FIL isn’t so much a perfectionist as he is afraid to do something wrong. Roughly the same end result, though.
 
The problem, of course, is that true perfection isn't achievable. In anything. Trying to achieve perfection just means you end up taking a lot longer than necessary to get something done. And at some point, everybody just accepts "good enough" - it's just that everybody's definition of "good enough" is different.

For example, in aviation terms, what's a perfect steep turn? Altitude varies by 50 feet? 20? 10? Where you can't see the needle move? At some point you have to accept good enough or you never move on.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Engineers are trained to make things only as expensive as necessary, but half-assing things is making things "cheaper" than necessary too, because in the long run it will cost you.
Click to expand...
The division VP in my last engineering job liked to say, "Don't try to save us money!" We could buy anything we legitimately needed, and used top quality components. It was a refreshing change from previous jobs where everything was half assed because we couldn't afford to do it right. He built the division from two guys in a shared office to a couple hundred people and the most profitable division in the company. When he retired, things started to go downhill.
 
Penny wise, pound foolish is a very old, very wise saying for a reason…..
 
One of the guys I worked with said he worked construction during summers in high school and college. He told his boss something about how maybe there was a better way to do something. He said the boss told him, "Kid, I hired you from the neck down."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top