We should aim for perfection and stop fearing failure.
Have you ever heard of typosquatting? Well typosquatting is where companies like Google post advertising on websites that are commonly miskeyed, and they sit back and make in millions–banking on the fact that you are visiting something like Gmale or mikerowesoft.com. Just seems kind of silly. Doesn’t it?
How about this?
On Feb 28, an Engineer at Amazon made a similar mistake by error. Only I say seemingly small because this little typo on Amazon’s super code produced a massive internet slow down that cost the company over 160 million dollars in a span of just 4 hours.
But this is actually really scary. You see recently an employee at New England compound, which is a pharmaceutical manufacturer, didn’t clean a lab properly and 16 people have died and hundred more have contracted meningitis.
I mean these examples are crazy, right?
When did we come to live in a world where these type of typos, common errors, this do-your-best-attitude or just good enough was acceptable? At some point we have stopped valuing perfection and now these are types of results that we get. We should all Seek perfection, all the time, I think we need to get it quick.
On an average hundred people die every day due to crashes. Now that line of work, in driving must have a unique understanding of the cost of failure, the cost of failure of just 99% because in the world of professional driving just 99% off the job main somebody dies.
That’s like equivalent of four commercial Airlines, crashing every week yet, we still dont convince ourselves to pay perfect attention behind the wheel.
One wrong word, one misspelt word, one missing word, one missing comma, is a failed test. Don’t be late not to class, not to break, not to lunch. When you are supposed to be somewhere, be there.
Perfection is an attitude developed in small things and then apply to larger jobs. So basically if you can’t get little things right, you are going to fail, when it counts, when you are driving a car, it counts.
A car travelling at 55 miles an hour covers the length of football field in just under 4 and half seconds, but just so happens to be the same amount of time it takes, the average person to check a text message.
I’m tired of everybody else accepting 99% is good enough. I mean being less than perfect has real consequences, doesn’t it?
If the makers of our credit cards were only 99.9% effective, there would be million of cards in circulation today, that had wrong information on the magnetic strip on the back. Or if the Webster’s dictionary was only 99.9% accurate it would have 470 misspelt word in it. If our doctors only 99.9% correct then every year 4,453,000 prescriptions would be written incorrectly and probably even scarier 11 newborns would be given wrong parents everyday.
The reality is that 16 people are now dead, 180 have been injured and 34 million cars are being recalled because producers of a car airbag produced and distributed a product that they thought was good enough. The reality is that medical errors are now 3rd leading cause of death 250,000 people die each year because somebody who probably thought, were doing their job good enough, messed up.
Is hard for us to believe anything these days, when Less than 50% of what news pundits say is actually grounded.
So trying to be this is not good enough.
So how do we change?
We seek perfection and settle for nothing else.
It probably goes something like perfection is impossible for humans so therefore seeking perfection will not only ruin your self esteem, but, it will render you a failure. But there’s the irony. So, today, we all are so freight of that word failure. But the truth is we need to fail. Failure is a natural stepping stone towards perfection but at some point because we became so afraid of that idea of failure, and so afraid, of that idea of perfection, we dismissed it because of what might happen to our Egos when we fall short.Do you really think that failure’s going to ruin you?Or is that just the easy answer that gets us slow websites? Scary Healthcare and dangerous Road?
Failure and Imperfection are basically the same thing. We all know that Imperfection exist all around us. Nothing and nobody is perfect but at same point, as it was too difficult or too painful we decided to dismiss or natural ability to deal with failure and we replace it by lower acceptance level and now we are all forced to sit back and just accept this new norm or good enough attitude and the results that come with it.Still people will ask,” Didn’t the medical staff,the maintenance crew, the engineer didn’t they try their best and isn’t that good enough?”
Well truthfully not for me and especially not in this examples.But you know trying to be perfect is so stressful right.Stress is bad for us, isn’t it? Well it maybe but, to say that seeking perfection is too stressful, is like saying that exercise is too exhausting. In both cases if you want the results you would have get to endure the pain. So, truthfully saying that seeking perfection is too stressful, is just an excuse to be lazy.But Here’s the really scary part. Today doctors, therapists, and nearly 10-billion-dollar-a-year self help industries are all advocating againnst the idea of perfection. Under this guise that somehow not trying to be perfect, will save your self-esteem and protect your ego. But see it’s not working.
Because the self help industry today has higher recidivism rate because, it’s more focused on teaching you how to accept a failure and lower your acceptance level that is about pushing you to be perfect.
The true illness in our society today is our unwillingness to confront failures. We are more comfortable resting on our efforts then we are with focusing on our results.
But, see, we are more comfortable offering up an equal outcome that we are with comforting with failure, the loser or the under achiever. When everybody gets a prize, everybody advances or everybody gets a pay raise despite results, the perfectionist in all of us is left to wonder, What do I have to do to get better?
How do I rise above the crowd?And see if we continue to cultivate this culture when nobody fails, or nobody is told that they will fail, then nobody is going to reach their potential either. Failure and loss are necessary for success, it’s the acceptance of failure that’s not.
So here’s the idea:
Instead of defining perfectionism as a destructive intolerance for failure, why don’t we try giving it a new definition? Why don’t we try defining perfectionism as a willingness to do things what is difficult to achieve, what is right?We can agree that failure is a good thing in a quest for perfection and when we seek perfection without fear of failure, just think about what we can accomplish.Then we can stop fearing failure and could stop living in the world filled with the consequences of good enough.THANKYOU
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