I Don’t Deal With “Perfect” Companies!

I learned a little lesson last Sunday while I was watching the Phillies make it to the next round in the playoffs — perfection does not exist and shouldn’t be falsely attained! Let me explain (before you start calling me a loser, jerk)…

Ok, so here I was last Saturday, watching the Milwaukee Brewers beat my Fightin’ Phils and crushing my dreams of getting the series sweep that I thought was only inevitable throughout the playoffs (after this game we were now 2-1 in a five-game NLCS). At this point, I thought “dang it … here we go again (we’re synonymous with blowing it at the end),” then came this huge Sunday win and my spirits jumped right back up.

My friend, perfection is only an illusion! Chasing it is never going to make you happy, not to mention it will never make you completely successful in any business endeavors. Sounds bassackwards, right? Well then, let me explain further…

Life’s super tough, when all you care about is being perfect. There is an old saying: you can rate your success by how well you lived your life. With this said… I guess I consider myself very successful, because I truly appreciate so many people and aspects of my life. But, I am nowhere near perfect. I try to always do my best and hope that it’s good enough. I hope that I am a good enough brother or son. I hope that I’m a good enough human being … but then again, I know that I will never be perfect.

I must forgive myself and be okay with it. There are just too many things that I have no control over. I shouldn’t waste energy on those issues, but try instead to try and change the things that I can control. There are always going to be people who only expect the best from you, but remember this: No one can be perfect all the time (not even those people who are asking of it from you) and in all actuality, perfection is so subjective that you might never meet these jerks’ high ideals anyway. An important thing to remember is to at least learn from your mistakes, and if certain customers can’t understand that it’s almost impossible to do everything right the first time, every time, you might be better off worrying about the rest of your customers who do love your services …

People buy things for a never-ending number of reasons (this is just human nature) but most of them don’t expect perfection. Why? Well, for starters, what’s perfect to one person will be unbearable to another. You can, with enough concentration of talent, build something that’s almost perfect for a lot of people. Companies have gotten famous by doing this before (think Apple or Google). And there are also many other smaller companies delivering fantastic products that are almost perfect for almost everyone, but every single one of these products is flawed in some ways for some people. In this sense, “perfection” is meaningless; a red herring in the marketplace. Remember this: perfection will not make you the best, but a really good fit for a common denominator (happy customers) will!

Think about this for a second: even if you could build a product that would win over everyone’s heart and feel just perfect to your entire target market that euphoria will eventually shift, relegating your perfect product to the Goodwill bargain bins everywhere. In short, even if perfection was theoretically possible, if you built a product that was perfect today it would definitely be imperfect tomorrow.

Never beat yourself up for not being perfect (the most successful people never do). If your boss is demanding perfection, guess what? He’s probably just trying to cover his imperfect ass. This goal is unachievable and should be the furthest from your mind during the workday, while customer focus should be on top of your list. One thing I truly know is people, and the ones that I associate with would rather buy from someone who may have some human flaws, but will always gives a great conversation and truly knows how to make someone feel special. Just like my Phillies … they might not have been to the big game since ’93, but at least they know how to keep their customers (read: fickle Philadelphians) on the edge of their seats.

Who knows … I could be dead wrong, but at least I’m now enjoying my imperfect life since I discovered this little known fact. Go P-H-I-L-L-I-E-S (thanks for the lesson. now go win the World Series the hard way)!