Perfection.

Rhythm, not results. And not wielding perfection as a weapon.

Christian Bale as Ken Miles in Ford vs. Ferrari shows his son the perfect lap laying perpetually in the distance.

I have a love / hate relationship with the concept of perfection. I love the chase of perfection, when I can go deep into a task and spend as much time there as I’d like. Write and rewrite a post (or my book) a dozen times.¹ Or tinker on a design problem to get it to the most optimal result. Or even just play a song through with the right timing and expression. These are all things I used to have a lot of time for but didn’t do because I was focused on a result, then for a long time had no time for and was still focused exclusively on results, and am only now discovering how to do for their intrinsic joy.

Two thirds of that list, when I focused on results, represents the times I let perfectionism be wielded against me, and they just so happen to line up well with the first two thirds of my life. The first phase of misusing perfection as a motivator started pretty early in my life. I don’t have a firm timeline, but one memory with my grandfather still stands out clearly:

“Huh, I guess half-ass is twice too good for you.”

This was his assessment of the result of some simple job he’d asked me to do. If the syntax is a little hard to follow, he was saying that if I’d set out to do a half-ass job, I had managed to half-ass even that. In other words, I’d done a quarter-ass job. My grandpa was full of helpful little nuggets like this.²

I received that first “quarter-ass” grade when I was around eight or nine years old. I don’t even remember what I’d been working on to elicit such a reaction, I just remember losing a feeling of pride in the work I’d done and having it replaced with with: “Do better, which I won’t bother explaining.”

Still, I looked up to my grandpa as a master carpenter and veteran, and wanted his approval; even if I’d need telepathy to nail down what he even wanted. It’s no wonder I ended up nurturing perfectionist tendencies³ and tying a perfect outcome to my self-esteem. My Dad, who spent a lifetime receiving similar guidance from grandpa, turned out with many of the same tendencies, but much less harsh. In his defense, near-perfection was required for his line of work, running a small family business that flew cargo, fuel, and food through the mountains of Western Alaska to villages off the road system.

A mistake in that situation, across any number of facets from weather planning, to payload weight, to balance, or maintenance might mean death. Hell, even just taking off in the wrong mood can cause pilots not to come home.⁴ This made him obsessive in his approach to all aspects of flying because it directly impacted his (and his family’s) survival. Some things really do just have to be right, or things are going to go wrong in a hurry.⁵

Rockets Ain’t Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

After over a decade in the space industry, I have to admit that I not only understand both my Dad’s and grandpa’s push for perfection, but I also crave it. Funny how genetics and parenting work. Somehow, I found the aerospace industry (or maybe it found me) and fell into work that required an absolute best effort, constantly⁶. The funny thing about the aerospace industry is that it’s one of the few industries in the world that’s truly binary:

• The rocket launches, or it doesn’t.

• The payload gets to orbit, or it doesn’t.

• The payload achieves its mission, or it doesn’t.

This is what makes aero engineering exciting! There isn’t any almost or partial credit — it ain’t horseshoes and hand grenades. The interface created between your product, reality, and the mission they go on together is all that matters. The relationship between whatever you made, and the rest of the world is supreme. The bad news for your pursuit of perfection in this dynamic is that you/me/we are all quite fallible and bad luck is a real thing that stumbles along to fuck up your day.

For a lot of companies (especially startups, especially mission-oriented startups) there is a tendency to believe that luck has nothing to do with the outcome at all. By remaining in a state of perceived perfection (i.e. a hyper attentive adrenaline fight or flight state) bad luck can be prevented. Simple mistakes can be prevented. Humans making silly human errors can be erased.

In this way, the pursuit of perfection turns from a noble goal on the horizon into a blunt instrument wielded to squeeze more out of less. Less people, less money, less time. I have been in that seat many times, as both an engineer and a manager, and it sucks. Sometimes it’s born honestly from a need to take a big swing at a hard goal, but more often than not it is simply assholes weaponizing the need of perfection in a lofty mission⁷ to keep young engineers scared, adrenaline dependent, and on their toes.

Reclaiming Perfection

This is how most space companies run, and a big part of the reason I started to turn into a major crab. Even still — I feel the pull! Oh, I how I feel the pull. I love when things come together in some delightful way that we decide to call perfect. It feels like we tap into the base rhythm of the Universe.

The good news is that I think perfection can be reclaimed. The way to do so is deceptively simple: focus on the approach, not the result.

This is the heart of Dharma. Working with what the Universe gives us and doing our best to make something of it. By not focusing on the result, sometimes delightful things happen that are much better than what we initially imagined. Working in this way honors both our gifts, and our challenges. Move forward, with the resources you have, in the time available. Bring your absolute best (dare I say, perfect?) self to this task each and every time. Then, let the results be what they are.

This is how perfection becomes a dynamic rhythm instead of a fixed state. Not even moment is perfect. Instead, perfection becomes like a star above the horizon, guiding us toward our ultimate potential. We all know that feeling when everything is going your way, when luck is on your side. The feeling of playing a tricky song for the first time all the way through, the feeling of nailing a job interview, hitting every green light and having traffic part in front of you. It’s flow. Perfection can be found in presence with any task.

That’s something I wish I could have told my grandpa almost 30 years ago when he called my efforts quarter-ass. Compared to what he could do as a veteran, master carpenter, and full adult, I am sure whatever I produced sucked! But the result shouldn’t have his focus, or at a minimum that result should have been normalized against what a child could be expected to do.

However, the thing I think he had right all those years ago, is that something worth doing is worth doing the best we can, which in his grumpy way is the lesson he wanted me to take. Christian Bale, explaining the chase for a perfect lap as race driver Ken Miles in Ford v Ferrari, explains that concept… well, perfectly:

The pursuit of perfection is something personal, to be shared with others who are like minded and not to be weaponized against them. It is to be practiced in a craft, not on people. It is the perpetual chase for something that’s always just over the horizon. That’s what makes it a rhythm, and not a result.

1. Many iterations ago, this post, for instance, was a rant about the rhythm of traffic and that some people don’t seem to get it.

2. A favorite of mine was, “If your stature matched your character, you’d have to stand on your tiptoes to kiss my fucking ass.” He never used that one on me, luckily.

3. Being a first-born type-A Virgo psychopath didn’t help, either.

4. You can be old, or you can be bold, as the old saying goes.

5. For a taste of what this is like, imagine the love of your life being the first user of whatever crazy hardware project you’re dreaming up (assuming you’re a builder), or the person whose opinion you dread most publishing the first review of your next work (assuming you’re a creator).

6. Or so we were told at the time.

7. Don’t let the light of consciousness be extinguished, and other manipulative mantras.