Nigel 
September 9th,2009
If writers delayed sending off the manuscript till it was perfect nothing would ever get published
My father used to say that if a job is worth doing at all it’s worth doing well.
This was good advice but it also created more problems than it solved.
I used to be too much of a perfectionist and there isn’t time to do everything well that’s worth doing. Yes,if a job’s worth doing at all it’s great to do it well –but doing it badly is often better than leaving it undone. A note put out for the milkman (yes we still have our milk delivered) needs to be legible and clear. It isn’t a book cover. It does not need to be a work of art,or catch attention amongst many other notes.
Years ago on a one day seminar the speaker described one of the previous courses he had run. His employers announced they would be recording one of the presentations in order to add it to their selection of audio seminars. In those days they came as a pack of cassette tapes and they were worth buying. He was nervous. Rightly so.
The day of the recording arrived and he woke up with a bad cold after a disturbed night. Paracetamol helped. A bit. His throat still hurt,his head still ached,he still felt unsteady on his feet. But the sound engineer had arrived and was setting up the kit,and the paying audience were arriving. The show must go on.
It was without doubt the worst seminar he had ever given,and he should know.
Some weeks later the Managing Director rang him. He waited for the storm of anger but instead:“I’ve just finished listening to the recording. Congratulations! It will be one of the very best in our collection.”
His bad was still good. That’s often the way. If we have experience and know what we’re doing then most people won’t know we’re feeling rough and underperforming unless we tell them. For the audience at that seminar his second best was more than good enough.
Marking a pile of exercise books I would want to write loads of helpful comments and show every student where he’d misunderstood. If I did this thoroughly it took a long time and left me very tired. In the end I managed to persuade myself to give most books little more than a cursory glance and a mark. I’d spend more time on a few where my effort was probably important to that student on that topic.
Often I would teach a full day so depressed I could barely stand. Sometimes I would be unable to answer a student’s maths question because my mind wouldn’t function properly. I could spend days on end wanting to flee the classroom and start crying. That’s what depression can do to you. It felt that bad. But it was far better for the students to have my second best than to have a substitute teacher who would just set work and get on with some marking.
Writing is a job that’s easy to put off. Almost every day I find myself thinking,well I’m not too good today. Maybe I’ll feel better later. I should put off writing till tomorrow when I’ll be able to do it better. But actually a writer needs to write. Sometimes I’ve been surprised on rereading it the next week how good it was. Most other times the weak start has produced plenty of useful material that merely required thorough editing –a much easier task than the first draft.
Moral one
There isn’t time to do everything to perfection. There is time to quickly assess how near perfection we need to get and then go for that. Most of what we do has to be second or third best. The trick is to make sure everything is adequate (and not kill ourselves when we fail,as we sometimes will).
Moral two
Our second best is often good enough and almost always better than doing nothing.
Afterthought
That draft book cover is okay,but could be a lot better. I’m reading a couple of books on page design. Should improve the web site too,especially that confusing home page.
Ah,well said that man –I wish I had had that clarity of explanation a few years back because your tale has parallels in businesses. You see,there was a small group of (extremely skilled) guys in my business who –whenever we got a project in –would always want to do the tip-toppermost job on it. The problem was that I knew how long it would take me to do,quoted on that basis,and then discovered they would take twice as long. Even when quizzed about this,the response was usually “Well,you quote what you like that will get the customer to pay,but it will take X days whatever you quote for –we refuse to do the work unless we can do it properly.”
They simply couldn’t get into their heads that there is a sliding scale in the quality of project delivery and that it’s important to hit the sweet spot on it.
At one end there is ‘Useless,this has made things worse,I’m not paying you at all,and in fact I’ll probably sue you.’,and at the other end there is ‘This is the best possible job that could have been done –no stone has been left unturned and the engineer is clearly capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound.’. The difficulty is that neither is commercially workable –the first is clearly disastrous,and the second will probably make you a loss,or at best break even –which is no good for paying the bills.
What is needed is a happy half-way house where the customer is just slightly more than contented (i.e. he can see some quality in the work that is more than ‘average’for the money he’s being asked to pay),but which doesn’t necessarily have all the finesse that a wine connoisseur will detect in a vintage bottle of Krug. It’s about the balance between customer happiness (for which read ‘propensity to come back next time he wants something and/or recommend you to someone else’) and cold,hard,cash. On a first job for a customer,you might err slightly –and I do only mean slightly towards the ‘tip top’end of the spectrum.
(Incidentally,the ‘tip top’job can be counter-productive too –if it takes longer than the customer wants then it may be perceived as wasting his time,which is Very Bad.)