Get A Grip
I’ve just completed the sixth Million Dollar Club, this one in Hong Kong, with elite consultants from three countries. I accept only ten firms. I’be been immersed in sophisticated and productive and energetic thinking (and dining).
So to welcome me back to the rest of the world, I received two emails this morning. One is from someone who has read my free newsletter, Balancing Act, for the very first time, and felt constrained to immediately point out a typo. “Perhaps good enough isn’t enough,” she pompously proclaimed, using the title from one of my books to try to make her “gotcha” point. I told her that if that’s the only thing that moved her to write from a newsletter with four columns dripping with content, then perhaps I’m not for her.
The second was a person I don’t know who presumptuously informed me that my views of Beijing are incorrect, despite having been there last week, because, while he has never been there, he has two friends who are academics who were there two years ago, and they disagree with my observations and experiences. He felt constrained to write me six paragraphs on that. I told him that he ought to go himself, but since I’ve been to 60 countries and people consider me able to eat solid food without dropping it on my lap, that perhaps I may be accurate and his friends either distant or with an academic’s agenda.
Of course I’m venting here. But when people are moved solely to “correct,” to point out errors (and not even in fact but often in taste), and to try to undermine, despite their insistence on “just helping,” they are wasting the time that the universe has bestowed. Finding fault is easy, non-productive, and trivial.
Finding meaning and improvement and contribution are the stuff of the people I had the pleasure to be with during the week here. Which path are you on?
© Alan Weiss 2013
Alex Singleton
You make a sound point. There are inevitably typos on my blog because I bash out posts and don’t use a proof-reader or a lengthy editorial process. The truth is that perfection is not desirable: it would delay publication and mean blogging becomes expensive.
When people say that they are “perfectionists”, what they mean is that they don’t get much done. I prefer to achieve goals.
Simma
That was one of the most valuable tips I learned when I attended my first workshop with you. Had I not learned your 80% rule, I’d still be working on the same first article years later.