Chasing excellence

There's a quote I've struggled with my entire life, especially as a creative person.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Since I was young I always strove for some sense of perfection, often to the detriment of myself and getting things done. Every time I worked on something I would end up obsessing over the smallest details and wanting to get things right. After all, I'm a creative person, I don't want the things I make to be just good, I want them to be amazing. Perfect.

At some point in university, I heard the phrase and learned to stop obsessing. I learned about the Pareto principle and incorporated that into what I do. But every time, it felt like I was killing a part of myself by being okay with putting something out there that I wasn't 100% happy with.

Near the end of university, I interned on the trading floor at Scotiabank and worked directly under a managing director. I remember his obsessive attention to detail and saw a little of my old me in him. But I was a different person now, I aimed on getting things done quickly and not spending as much time fussing over details.

I remember one time he looked over a deck I did for him and tore it apart. At one point during the critique, he mentioned my text boxes were not aligned. I argued that they were, after all I could see it clearly with my eyes. So he drew a rectangle in PowerPoint, lined it up with the text, zoomed in until you could see the pixels, and proved that my alignment was off by a few pixels.

I realized I was dealing with a serious person. A person who took the smallest details, details that most wouldn't even notice, seriously. I fixed the deck and in the evening, he told me something that resonated so deeply with me, I still carry it with me today in most things I do.

It doesn't matter what you do, if you hate your job, hate your coworkers, whatever your situation is - always do work that you're proud of. After all, it's your name on there.

It wasn't until this that I realized what I had been chasing the entire time. It wasn't perfection, rather it was excellence.

I wanted to put out excellent work. I wanted people to think my work was excellent. To know my work was excellent.

That lesson helped me realize that I should try to have everything I work on have some aspect of that pursuit of excellence - that obsession for amazing put into it. Naturally, I still need to make these tradeoffs of knowing when to stop, but I always try to make sure I'm proud of the things I build, at least at some level.

The other part I still struggle with is: what is excellence? Everyone has a different definition of it, my excellence may be another's low effort trash. I'm not really sure how to figure or navigate that question. Maybe at the end of the day it's deeply personal. And perhaps it shouldn't be any other way. If art is personal expression, perhaps so too should excellence.