Being a disciplined half-ass
Yea I try hard. Like really hard.
Growing up in an Asian American culture where I was raised to believe doing all the right things will get you rewarded and doing one wrong thing will get you punished, I needed to excel at everything; everything needed to be perfect. Don’t get me wrong, this perfectionism certainly has gotten me pretty far in my career. But damn, the downfalls are starting to show:
It was all fun and games for like.. 2 seconds
I ran an LLC a while back, first as a fun project to challenge the current education system, but later on got traction from tens, then tens of hundreds of customers. There was only one problem — — I was far too scared that the business model looked too juvenile for real start-up big dogs to get any VC fundings. Yes I got on a few VC calls, but the humility got to the best of me and I stopped. The business went on for a while, it was all fun and games until one day we massively delayed the service because of the unforeseen demand and our lack of resources, and left many customers furious, or even worse, disappointed. The 24-year-old me, embarrassed and ashamed of the cluster-mess I have gotten the company into, decided to kill the project rather than exposing the imperfectness to a larger crowd.
Ouiiii. The endless sleepless nights of the not-good-enoughs was the death of me; and… literally the death of my business.
As soon as I woke up from this nightmare that I trapped myself into, I knew exactly where my mentality journey needs to go next.
I do realize most folks are familiar with the now overly-used notion of Minimal Viable Products, success stories of startup scrappiness, but let’s really dissect the philosophy behind the jargons and take a look at what’s on the table for us:
There are only so many hours in a day, after all. There are only so many days in a year, only so many years in a life. You do what you can do, as competently as possible within a reasonable time frame, and then you let it go. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it doesn’t even need to be even near perfect; it just needs to be done. Be done with it and let it go.
I challenge you to think of 3 things you’ve wanted to do but haven’t started because you’re afraid it won’t be done beautifully, gracefully, or perfectly.
Pick one, don’t even dare think about aiming towards perfection, and see how you feel while you do it. Do you feel a stronger flow? Do you feel scared it won’t be good enough ? Are you less excited? More excited? Are you now more at ease with expectations? Whatever you observe, remember the feeling, and use it to your advantage as you execute this half-ass-ness over and over again.
Here’s to being a disciplined half-ass. 🥂
Hi, my name is Serena and I’m a bit too obsessed with operations and half-ass solutions. I invite you to join my journey.
