I always believed that “Practice Makes Perfect.” While it can be true that the more you work on something the better you get, the problem with setting “perfection” as the goal is that someone else has to grant you that award. You have to find out in both explicit and implicit ways what criteria they are using to measure your work. I can tell you from experience, that its an exhausting process trying to please everyone. Even if you can find a way to juggle all of the different criteria for achievement, your performance becomes set by what others want of you. When in actuality, you don’t need to be anyone but yourself to get ahead. Rather your uniqueness is not only important, but critical to a teams’ success.
A more productive approach to performance is to focus on what you can control: your work ethic, your effort, your skillset, your health and your ability to collaborate with others. And then to really understand your performance progression, your best bet is to compare your performance today to yesterday’s. The way to grow is to consistently make progress over that performance. Another way to think of it is that you are really competing with yourself vs competing with others. And if you are competing with those around you, I think you are playing the wrong game. Your energy is better served in improving your own performance so you that you can better serve your company or those around you.
Also when you are thinking about a progress framework, it helps you reclassified a failure to a learning. Thomas Edison once famously said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” To make progress you will need to take risks, and thinking of failures as learning should free you up to push the envelope.
Bottom-line, all of us are progressing, and if you give yourself enough room to make mistakes and learn, you may take enough risks to achieve your highest potential. The choice is yours.
Molly K. West 