Success, Not Perfection

Shoot for success, not perfection.

Success is the path of confidence. Perfection is the path of arrogance. If you’ve achieved perfection in something, by your estimation, there is nothing that can be improved upon, nothing to be learned.

This belief, that you have nothing more to learn, is the key difference between confidence and arrogance. With confidence, you know your value, and that value is good enough by the metric that matters: success.

If you succeed at something, that warrants confidence. You may still be able to learn more, to improve, to gain the skill and capacity to deliver even more value next time, or in a situation where the bar is higher – where previously you may have failed, but now you believe you will succeed.

Perfection means “I’m done learning,” which is arrogance, and will blind you to shifting winds and subtle (or not-so-suble) feedback. Your rate of success may then decline, while you continue of course to be “perfect”. Don’t strive for perfection; strive for success.