Are you hard or easy on yourself?

“Perfection is the enemy of profitability.”

Mark Cuban said that on an episode of Shark Tank that I watched recently. I often remind myself of his quote.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have understood what he meant. Ever since I was little, I have been a perfectionist. I wanted everything I did to be the best that it could possibly be. An excellent example of this obsession can be found in my fifth grade U.S. geography unit. During that unit, we were assigned coloring sheets of different regions of the U.S. for homework. On the evenings that we received these sheets, I colored them at my dining room table for two or three hours. I still remember the process that I used to do this. First, I would choose the color that I thought best represented the state that I was coloring. Then, I outlined its border meticulously, making sure not to lose focus, and god forbid, color into another state. After I was satisfied with the border, I started to color in the middle, which was the most tedious part of the process. I started at the top of the state. I would make a couple strokes, and then go back over them again. I made my way down inch by inch, paying special attention to the darkness of the coloring. Every inch of the state had to be evenly saturated and as dark as possible so the colors would be vibrant. Then, after slowly making my way down to the bottom of the state, I’d pick a new color for the next one, and repeat the process all over again. 

Now, it’s hard to imagine that I spent hours on something as insignificant as an elementary school coloring sheet. But at that time, doing the best coloring job that I could became the most important thing in the world to me, so much so that I lost track of time. 

I think that I often tied my happiness to doing well, and in that way, I was too hard on myself. Perfection is unachievable, so attaching happiness to the pursuit of perfection is unproductive. An obsession to do well is beneficial at times, but sometimes, it is unnecessary. I can’t imagine how much time I’ve spent on other assignments that I didn’t need to, focusing on small and relatively unimportant details like wording, formatting, colors and more that no one would have noticed, but I worked on persistently just so I could know that I tried my best. 

It’s imperative now to think about when and when not to be hard on myself. Like Mark Cuban said, perfection is the enemy of profitability, and I’m working on finding a balance between my use of time and productivity.