Did you know that perfection is impossible? It’s a function of subjective opinion (who gets to decide?) and it requires unattainably perfect understanding and agreement.
Creating perfection also requires infinite work because the more precisely you try to specify something, the more data points you need to capture its detail. The coastline paradox illustrates this very well.
Why do we cling onto the idea of perfection? Perfection is a symptom of trying to reduce uncertainty. Trying to be certain about everything creates inaction because you quickly get swamped by the work required to uncover and mitigate risk.
Paul Valéry wrote “In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, of the book to the fire or to the public, whether due to weariness or to a need to deliver it for publication, is a sort of accident, comparable to the letting-go of an idea that has become so tiring or annoying that one has lost all interest in it.”
Can you rest, contented, in the abandonment of your work at a moment when it is “good enough”?
Try abandoning perfection. It’s quite freeing.