That desire for perfection can also be a desire to be done. To have it finished and get closure. It's hard to accept that some things are going to take a long time or a lifetime.
It's what I tried to capture in the post, but probably could have put better.
The sense of just taking the steps I can today, rather than burdening myself with the expectation of needing to have worked it all out and achieved all of my comparison-driven life goals.
The key is to find healthy rhythms that help us continue to better ourselves over time.
I did similar too. Amongst the dozens of despicable things, one of the precious few good things to come out of a divorce is the new appreciation and deep understanding of God accepting us just as we are. Married or not, perfect or not (mostly not!), guilty or not. He pursues us, loves us, and improves us, slowly, over time.
when i read caps i can almost feel the author's resentment at having had to reach for one of those shift keys and break up their typing rhythm, when without them text can flow so easily.
I find it harder to read and it comes across as the author using a passive aggressive tone where they can't be bothered to form sentences properly.
Probably the best way to describe it is, itwouldbelikesomeonenotbotheringtousespacesandexpectingyoutomakesenseofit. It makes communication harder.
Personally the caps are second nature. You may find me sending U's and O's before you see me sending i's :-)
When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. And now—now I meet it with my spirit and don’t look with my eyes. My senses and conscious awareness have shut down and my spiritual desires take me away. I follow the Heavenly pattern of the ox, thrusting into the big hollows, guiding the knife through the big openings, and adapting my motions to the fixed structure of the ox. In this way, I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
Thanks for sharing!
Striving for perfection is a toxic habit (not just to your team, but to yourself too). However, there's also a category of people that write sloppy/unthoughtful code at the expense of their colleagues. Often times this is just due to inexperience, and we should reach out with advice and mentorship, but also have patience with their pace of improvement.
However, there's also a subset of people who abuse this compassion to get away with being sloppy intentionally (ie lazy). We should be mindful that these people exist, as they also create resentment/contempt, which also creates a toxic work environment.
It's different from the one I tend to apply, in my own work.
I used to work for a famous Japanese imaging corporation. Their brand was pretty much synonymous with "Quality."
They got that way, by practicing Perfection as a religion. It could be very, very tough, to deal with, but it gave me a great appreciation for a Quality mindset, in my own work.
The result is that even my lash-up, throwaway code, tends to be better than many folks' final release code.
This has great advantages for me. In fact, I just experienced one, a few minutes ago. If the baseline code is of as high Quality as I can possibly make it, then I can avoid lash-ups, or at least, reduce their severity, later. I refactored a fairly complex server interaction timeline, and it was made much easier, because I was pretty damn anal, when I first wrote it, maybe six months ago.
I can fall into perfectionism, but I find this a suboptimal mindset for healthy outcomes.
Excellence seems the far better path.
Keeping a high bar still, but not expecting something that's unreasonable.
Continuing to challenge yourself to get better, but not expecting yourself to have achieved something already that's out of your grasp.
For me it's about trajectory and momentum over perfection.
It's fine to solve a vague problem by simply having the machine ask for human direction in a few cases. It's not fine to have the machine do something inappropriate or crash because a valid case wasn't handled in any way.
Everything below these vague areas can, and should, be perfect. People who claim this be an unobtainable goal are liars.
You may want to rethink this one
