Being a perfectionist is really hard. Nothing short of perfect is just good enough, so everything requires immense efforts. This could work successfully for a kid, but a grown-up needs to balance activities. Having a responsible job we need to balance three simple things: delivery time, quality of work, effort invested. The same three criteria apply to the main job and to our secondary jobs as a parent, a spouse etc.
As long as we do few things and the things that we do are not effort-intensive we could probably successfully juggle the task. Occasionally we would miss a deadline/birthday, forget to eat/sleep or provide an appalling quality of work, but most of the time we would succeed. With success the quantity of tasks and responsibility for each task increase. If you are a surgeon, you have very little room for mistakes, and then you need to decide what to prioritize.
If you choose to balance everything equally (engineer’s choice), your job will probably be mediocre and you will soon be forgotten. If you focus on quality (artist’s choice) you may miss all deadlines and your work will be destroyed with your reputation, but your work may also be so good that your reputation will skyrocket. If you keep providing the results on time (management choice), you will be respected as trustworthy, but you will probably be too tired to supply anything original. And finally if you will minimize the effort (default by most), you will ultimately fail and get to what is described by Parkinson: highest level of personal achievement is equivalent to personal incompetence.
Superlearning offers several ways to solve the dilemma:
- Speed up your work and each step will require less time
- Boost creativity and provide exceptional solutions within given time and effort
- Prioritize wisely, reducing your effort
- If you cannot handle the task properly, do not even start handling it…
I want to finish this post on a funny note. In 19th century before invention of anesthesia, the quality of a surgeon was determined by the speed the surgeon operated. One of the best surgeons in the word was Robert Liston. The guy was the fastest knife in England, a living legend. He is remembered by history for four exceptional deeds:
- Fourth most famous case
Removal in 4 minutes of a 45-pound scrotal tumour, whose owner had to carry it round in a wheelbarrow.
- Third most famous case
Argument with his house-surgeon. Was the red, pulsating tumour in a small boy’s neck a straightforward abscess of the skin, or a dangerous aneurism of the carotid artery? ‘Pooh!’ Liston exclaimed impatiently. ‘Whoever heard of an aneurism in one so young?’ Flashing a knife from his waistcoat pocket, he lanced it. Houseman’s note – ‘Out leaped arterial blood, and the boy fell.’ The patient died but the artery lives, in University College Hospital pathology museum, specimen No. 1256.
- Second most famous case
Amputated the leg in 21⁄2 minutes, but in his enthusiasm the patient’s testicles as well.
- Liston’s most famous case
Amputated the leg in under 21⁄2 minutes (the patient died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene; they usually did in those pre-Listerian days). He amputated in addition the fingers of his young assistant (who died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene). He also slashed through the coat tails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified that the knife had pierced his vitals he dropped dead from fright.
That was the only operation in history with a 300 percent mortality.
