A Hacker News reader asked about how to overcome perfectionism, which can lead to many problems in your work, personal life, family relationships, and more.
The top comment quotes from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman:
If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.
The same user makes the following excellent observation:
A useful thing to remember is that you are the ONLY person that knows how beautiful the thing you were planning to build was going to be. What you've actually built is always going to be disappointing compared to the potential thing you had imagined.
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I love that line of reasoning, because it reminds me of how sleight-of-hand magicians work. I've studied sleight-of-hand myself and I've learned that when you're performing something in front of an audience, they don't know what the end result is going to be. So if you happen to mess something up, just roll with it and turn it into something else. If you want to see this in action, here's a video of David Blaine doing exactly that when a trick doesn't go as expected.
So if you suffer from perfectionism that hinders your productivity, it might be good to think about other people's perspective of your work and not just your own — which is likely a narrow-minded view of what you're accomplishing.
Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!
