Many high achievers have one thing in common – they strive to achieve perfection in every little detail of a task at hand. Sometimes they might spend hours on a task just because they cannot understand or achieve each fine aspect of it, instead of focusing on a big picture and letting time help incremental progress lead to results.
When we are aiming at being good at something, the important thing to remember is that it takes time and if you get hang up on everything you don’t know on your way to the stars, you’ll never achieve them, because you’ll still be stuck digging through the trees. Whereas if you learn to let thing go and let your work be imperfect, let it be rough, weak, non-robust and messy, you’ll have a higher sense of achievement and if you persevere for long enough and stick around with the task or a job or a goal, you’ll notice how improvement comes naturally, without pushing through too much over-exhausting yourself, burning out and losing the flow, not because you aren’t good at what you do but because you aim to be perfect to soon, to quick.
Just like an artist, whose pictures are messy, unproportional and ‘incorrect’ to begin with, but he keeps painting because he is the flow, enjoying the process and doesn’t get hang up on those details that don’t turn out the way he wants. But if he paints for long enough, he’ll eventually become good and even brilliant. The important thing to remember is to keep learning and investing in your knowledge, because it’s impossible unless you are naturally gifted to learn how to pain by just keep practicing the wrong techniques and reinventing the wheel, while there are so many brilliant books, courses and learning materials have been developed by the best painters and artists to help armatures learn.
Same with any craft, be that personal training, design or quantitative finance, there are so many learning materials available, so the hardest thing is to pick the right ones, keep improving yourself and remember not to get attached to what is going wrong, instead focus on what’s going right and aim at completing the timely as opposed to perfectly – that will not only teach you time management, but also give you a feeling that you’ve achieved a lot, and in fact be a lot more useful than getting stuck on what you don’t understand or even give up on the whole thing because it is ‘too hard’. I believe it is good to pick up a craft, a skill or a job that is slightly above your capacities, that is difficult and uncomfortable to begin with, but not to get stuck on it but rather keep the progress according to a time schedule you’ve set out, even when every aspect is not completed to 100% understanding or perfection. It is better to complete the whole thing to average quality and maybe come back to it and go over it again in the future, as opposed to completing 30% and giving up.
These words don’t come from nowhere, they are the result of my own experiences and studying loads of literature on the subject of growth. When I was at a top university in the UK completing my masters in finance, which was beyond challenging given my weak and poorly prepared foreign background, I came across so many stumbling blocks that I nearly gave up and even had to take a gap to re-evaluate my approach. Once I changed the mindset of ‘perfect wannabe’ and getting stuck on everything I didn’t understand (which I had hundreds of), not only did I complete the course with the flying colours, but also I realised that most things that I hadn’t understand and parked aside, I did eventually understand without working on them specifically and concentrating on getting perfect at them, but instead simply by progressing with the course and learn to let go of perfection bias, which is an inherent trait of all (or at least most) people aiming for success.
Finance Beautiful 