Hiring the Best

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have an intern this summer who is helping me do some of the work that the other members of my team do not have the technical know-how to do. This is significant for us as a team because we have been trying to fill a spot to do this work ever since I started, and it’s been difficult to say the least. Thinking about this has naturally led me to think about being part of the interviewing process, and how it is a skill that I’ve surprisingly become quite good at.

Interviewing was certainly never something I saw myself doing through my first few jobs. You grow up thinking that interviewing is the realm of managers and important people. Interviewers are also supposed to be really tough and out to get you. So I was a bit surprised when I eventually got asked to help with interview loops at Amazon since I don’t fit any of those preconceived notions. But once I learned how the process worked, it made a lot of sense to be a part of it, and I soon grew to like it a lot.

I’m going to focus on three things here. First, why the Amazon process is so good. Second, why I find the process at my current company lacking in comparison. And third, what I’ve learned from being a part of both.

The title of this post comes from one of Amazon’s famous leadership principles, “Hire and Develop the Best”. And like all of their principles, Amazon throws a lot of resources at fulfilling that goal. The hiring process certainly isn’t perfect, as nothing is, but it does tend to hire the best the vast majority of the time.

There are three reasons why the hiring process works well. First, after the initial phone screen to measure basic skills for the role, the in-house loop contains 4-6 interviews, depending on the level of the role. The two most important aspects about the loop are that: each interviewer covers different skills and competencies, and interviewers never know what the other interviewers think until after they’ve made a decision to hire or not. These aspects ensure that loops are consistent, thorough, and as objective as possible.

Second, the company ensures that every interviewer has the right tools to get the job done. Obviously it is up to each interviewer to use them correctly (and it is clear that many do not), but it is super helpful overall. The tools ensure the important aspects of loops that I already spoke of are enforced. The hiring scheduler makes sure everyone involved knows exactly where to be, when to be there, what they need to cover, and hides other feedback before you make your decision. If an interviewer is not sure how to cover their assigned competencies, there are guidelines on what to ask and what to look for. There are mandatory training programs that each interviewer has to take, plus shadowing with an experienced interviewer, before they can go solo. I personally have some issues with those programs, but they do set a baseline that avoids bad situations that lead to candidates having a bad experience.

Third, every loop must have a third-party interviewer on it. This is done through Bar Raisers. Their purpose on loops is to make sure the candidate is a good fit for the company in order to prevent managers from hiring bad people out of desperation to fill out their team. Bar Raisers also make sure that loops are constructed properly beforehand, they lead the debriefs, and they have ultimate veto power if the manager continues to push for a hire when it’s a bad idea. This is the one area that sets Amazon apart from similar companies, and one of the reasons I got so good at interviewing is because I trained to be one.

I really enjoyed the whole process that Amazon put in place and it’s part of why I wanted to get more involved with interviewing more and more as I worked there.

Where I work now, things are… not the same. There is no real process to speak of, so I’ve been doing my best to put some in. Maybe it is different for other positions within the company, but for hiring people for my team the only process we have in place is that there is a phone screen and (if possible) an in-house with just two interviews. Possibly a third one if it’s warranted. I don’t feel this gathers enough data to make an educated decision.

But what I have been struggling the most with is that there is no goal in mind. What made the Amazon process so easy was that every role was clearly defined and when you went into the interview, you knew exactly what data points you were trying to get. Where I am now, the role is unclear and shifts depending on who we have at the moment, and my only direction is to “find out their technical ability.” I mean, I’m fully capable of doing that, but it’s pretty broad. It saddens me that technical ability is the only real factor in the decision, since team/culture fit is also important, but our company isn’t interested in that.

I know that I shouldn’t expect anything else from a startup. I’m not working at one of the biggest companies in the world anymore, that everyone in tech wants to work at, and gives offers to less than 20% of candidates. Obviously there’s no reason to have the same rigorous process, so I can live with it. The only thing that really annoys me about this new process is that people can’t stop telling me what they think when they finish and before I’ve had my turn. It’s a bad practice, skewing what interviewers think before they meet the candidate. I go out of my way now to not listen and get into the room as quickly as possible to avoid getting those negative impressions.

Overall the process of learning to interview has been really rewarding and helpful in other areas as well. I’ve historically been really bad at making small talk with people because I can’t think of questions to ask, or how to lead conversations. It’s a lot easier to answer other people when they ask about me. While I’m still not great at it, interviewing has forced me to be better at it, even though it’s in a different context. With interviewing, it’s easy to lead because I know exactly what I’m looking for. With just normal chit-chat, I still struggle because I have no real direction until something reveals itself. I have a lot of trouble getting interested in other people without some prompting. Interviewing has also gotten me more comfortable with just talking to people I don’t know, especially over the phone.

I’ve also learned how to prepare for interviewing people. When first starting out, I would try to just wing it, but I would never get the information I was looking for, which was a big no-no. So I started using templates to guide things better. When I got a competency I wasn’t used to interviewing for, I would have to get new questions, and over time I learned which questions worked and which ones didn’t. When I started doing the Bar Raiser program, I had to retool my whole process because I still wasn’t getting the data they wanted. I had to get a lot better at listening and really digging into the answers I was being given. That alone has paid the most dividends in how I interview people. By the end of my career there, I had a really good system going and I could get ready for a loop in 15 minutes or less, regardless of what role the candidate was interviewing for, or what I was asked to get data on.

This is all to say, I certainly have no intention to stop interviewing just because I don’t agree with how it’s done in my new company. I still like being a part of the process, knowing that my opinion is important and I get to have some control in deciding who I work with. And while I don’t get the same opportunities or feelings of success as I used to, I’m still learning and getting better at it all the time.

My Stupid Ego

I’m pretty sure I’ve reflected on this a few times in the past. I know I reflect on it in my head all the time. This week I want to lay out some thoughts on how my stupid ego causes me to struggle and stress for no good reason.

This is definitely not just a problem for me, most people struggle with their ego to some degree. Even those who appear to be the most selfless on the surface are driven by their egos. I suppose the only real way to get away from it entirely is to become a monk and isolate yourself from the rest of the world. I certainly don’t want to do that, I like living in the world, as do most people. So, we all struggle.

Ego itself is a manifestation of self-esteem, basically how you see yourself. I think it’s safe to say that everyone wants to be recognized for succeeding in whatever they choose to do, whether it is external or internal recognition, and that builds up self-esteem. For better or worse, I am much more externally motivated, I rarely get satisfaction from doing something unless it is appreciated by others. The very reason I am writing these posts at all is because I desire that validation.

So what are the things that I wish to succeed at? What do I want others to appreciate me for? For me, two things were defined pretty early in my life and I haven’t deviated much from it. The first is that I always strive to be liked by everyone. The second is that I want to recognized for my creative endeavors. Let’s break down each of these.

When I say that I want to be liked by everyone, that really does mean liked. Not loved, but liked, and certainly not disliked or hated. I’m sure that this stems from my early childhood where I got picked on a lot and I grew to have a fear of confrontation. To this day I don’t like arguing with people, and when I get hot under the collar it is because someone else is calling me out or yelling at me for whatever reason.

On the surface this doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Trying to get along with everyone is a respectable goal. But, in practice, the only real way to avoid confrontation is to be bland. I take everything in stride and I do nothing to rock the boat or sway the opinions of others. I come across as just another warm body in the room. The result is that instead of being someone that everyone likes, I am someone that everyone forgets about. And that’s where my stupid ego gets in trouble with itself because I want to be liked, not ignored. Yet I can’t bring myself to be more memorable because that necessitates being more open and potentially controversial. Ultimately, if I want to be liked I need to be okay with knowing that you can only be liked by some people if you are also disliked by others. It’s not a zero-sum game here, most people will probably like you, but at least one person is going to dislike or hate you, and I am trying to be okay with that.

This is not to say that I am completely forgettable. I have plenty of very close friends who like me and think about me all the time (I assume). They know that while I may not be the most opinionated person out there, I am certainly one of the most dependable, and the few insights I do express tend to be novel and accurate. But it does take a very long time with most people I meet to get that across. My stupid ego would probably prefer it if it took a little less time.

Between the two things I want to succeed at, the creative side is probably the more frustrating of the two. My stupid ego wants me to produce way more than I do, which is almost zero, but year after year passes by with little to show for it. There are three obvious reasons for this. One, going back to what I just talked about, I find it difficult to be motivated to do much because internally I feel that no one really cares about what I do. This stems from the feeling that most people find me forgettable. Two, I have a lot of interests and I have a lot of trouble picking with one and sticking with it long enough to actually produce something. Three, due to a combination of the first two points, I don’t prioritize doing creative things so I never make time to do them and nothing ever gets done.

On the first point, making something creative requires that you take a stand on something. And when you train yourself from an early age to not express opinions to avoid confrontations, it is hard to reverse that. So when I try to approach writing something, I ask myself why anyone else would read what I write. For the most part, I can’t come up with anything, which is why I rarely start on anything. I get an idea that I think could make a seed for a cool story and I work on it in my head, but I can’t think of what makes it worth someone’s time, so it just remains there in my head until I deem it otherwise. The positive is that over time the ideas do get better as I gain more experience and they reflect how I see the world now, but that doesn’t get them any closer to being in front of others. One of the reasons why I’m posting every week is to try to get more comfortable with producing half-baked ideas.

The second and third points might be harder to contend with. So many interests and never enough time to do them all. Prioritizing has never been my strong suit and it only got more difficult over time as I got more obligations and free time shrank. At any given time there are a dozen or more activities that I could do and be perfectly happy doing. Not only are there a bunch of options, but I need to decide how much time to devote to each. I can either try to get to them all and spend small amounts of time on each, or give more time to a few. These days I’m going with the latter, dedicating each evening to one activity so that I can focus and hopefully be more effective. Most people who do creative things for a living will tell you that you need to do it everyday to be effective, but I’ve tried to do that multiple times to little success. It tends to scatter my brain too much, I’m a lot better at giving something multiple hours and getting into a flow state. Whatever it takes to keep my stupid ego from being upset at not getting anywhere.

In the end, will I ever really be recognized for the things that I want? I certainly hope so. But I also need to come to terms with the idea that I may never get there, and my stupid ego is going to have to be okay with that.

Organization and Productivity: Fine Tuning

As promised, this post will mostly be an update to this previous post. What has been going well and what hasn’t worked out. Plus anything else I’ve been doing recently that has been helping me get more stuff done. Let’s get right to it.

Chores

I was already a while into this one when I wrote the first post, so I knew it was going to work out in the long run. And for the last few months, it really has made a difference in how I approach the chores that I don’t like. Dishes in particular are my least favorite chore (yes, even below cleaning the cat box), but knowing that it’s a morning chore takes a lot of pressure off every night. The only issue with the morning block is that if the dishes take longer than normal, or if I get a late start to the morning, it leaves no time for practicing guitar before work, which I always look forward to.

For sure, when it comes to things that you have to do, batching tasks and giving them a set time each day makes it a lot easier to keep on top of them.

Exercise

This is another area that has been going very well. I was still new to Orange Theory at the time I wrote the last post and only going two times a week. Now, both my fiancée are going at least three times a week, and it feels great. With as much as I need to get done, it’s a much stronger motivator to exercise when there is a set time that I must show up for (or risk losing money). I held off on going up from two times a week because I thought that I would go running on the weekends, but that never happened, as I predicted it would. I intend to keep going with my races (up to 10Ks now!) once per month, but the only training I’m going to do for those is with OT.

My advice is the same as before. If you have trouble committing to exercise, sign up for classes. It is a vastly superior option to going solo at the gym.

Using JIRA

I’m so glad I decided to go this route for keeping track of the personal tasks I want to get accomplished, though it has been a struggle finding that sweet spot of how much I should plan to do during the month. After several months, it would appear that on average I can complete 3-3.5 days worth of personal stuff, so around 80-90 hours, or 3 hours per day. That seems logical since an hour of that is listening to audiobooks to and from work, and the other two hours are things like studying French/German (started German since getting back from the trip, and it is significantly easier than French, partly because it’s the language I took in high school) and reading. The time it takes to write and proofread these posts are also tracked in JIRA, plus anything else that takes a worthwhile chunk of time to complete (at least 30 minutes). Normal day to day tasks are not tracked in JIRA, but I do track them either on my weekly list or as reminders if they are time sensitive or need to happen during work hours.

The biggest problem I still have is that I keep putting more tasks in the sprints than I can actually get through. For a while I didn’t know what to do with tasks that were going to take a few months to complete since they don’t fit the sprint model, so I would just put them in there anyway. This makes all of the graphs look awful though. They seem to indicate that I’m not getting as much done as I am, so I just settled on keeping track of these tasks by always having them at the top of the backlog list until they are small enough to be finished off in a month’s time.

I will stop before I put anyone to sleep with details, but it has also proven to be a great tool for keeping me on track with what I want to get done.

Incentive System

Unlike everything else, this ended up being a complete flop. As I suspected quickly after starting, unless you can come up with rewards that work for everyone involved, there are no incentives, so the whole thing just falls apart. I do still think the idea is a good one, it just needs to be rethought for different groups. I can see what I came up with working well if the group is made up of people who are doing the same things and are just competing to see who does the most over a period of time. But since my goals were vastly different from my fiancée’s, there was no real way to make them equal to each other. It was too easy for me to get way ahead of her because of the tasks involved, so she never had a chance to catch up.

In the end, the system is useless if there aren’t reasonable rewards to be had. Neither of us could come up with something since we already do as much for each other as possible without needing an excuse to do so. If I were to do it again, I’d probably do something with coworkers, and the reward would simply be a money pot or something else that everyone pitches into. Really no different from a gambling pool, or some other competition for a prize, but includes a tracking system that everyone can see. And realistically, the other methods I use for tracking are enough to keep me going towards my goals.

New Stuff

Not a whole lot of new things, but there are couple worth mentioning. Most of these have come either from Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy (highly repetitive, but has enough good content to be worth a read) or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, the book that every other self-help book tries to emulate. Seriously, I had no idea until I actually read it just how much every other book in its genre is just a rehash of what he wrote 25 years ago. It is absolutely worth reading for that reason alone.

One of the biggest takeaways I got from both books is that I didn’t have a really clear vision of what and where I wanted to be in a year, five years, or ten years. They both recommend writing those visions out as concrete goals, and then try to list everything I can think of that will get me one step closer toward those goals. I’ve done that before, a lot of my JIRA tasks are doing just that. But what I didn’t do that they brought to light was that I wasn’t doing a good enough job of prioritizing the goals. I kept thinking about what I felt should get done first, when I should’ve been thinking about which ones will have the most positive impact on me, and focus on those first. A very small difference, but caused a big change in my thinking.

Another good tip that I got is to always plan out my days the day before. I’d heard of doing this in the past, but I didn’t put much stock in it until I saw the common thread in these books and decided that it would be worth a shot. So I started out by just doing it at work, and it helped a bit, though it doesn’t work as well when I’m lacking in things to do, or I get blocked by something/someone else, or there I get a higher priority request that needs to be done that day. It has proven to be a lot more useful at home where I have no shortage of things to do.

The last thing I’ve been trying to get better at is focusing on one big task at a time. I’ve struggled to do this for a long time, so it’s not a new concept to me, but I figured I’d mention it since it’s talked about ad nauseum in those books. As a way to keep myself on a single goal at a time, I have changed my routine such that outside of reading and exercising, all of my free time will be focused on one thing until it is done. So instead of trying to set aside some time for languages, some time for writing, some time for guitar, etc. on a daily basis, I’m going to go all out on just one thing. I think to start with, I’m going to focus on getting through all the lessons on Duolingo for French and German. Once I’ve gotten through those, I can start a routine of just practicing them on a regular basis to build up the mental muscle, probably for 15-30 minutes each morning. This is not to say that I won’t spend some time doing other things that are relaxing, but I know that I have to push something off. Knowing ahead of time what I’m pushing off will keep me from getting frustrated when I keep falling behind on things.

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That being said, thanks to those tips, I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to write these posts on a weekly basis is not a high enough priority for me to keep it going. Compared to all of my other goals, posting on a website that no one really reads is generally a waste of my time when I could be using my writing time on something more useful, like stories. So, it was a fun challenge to keep this going for a few months, but I don’t feel like there are enough (or any) benefits to doing this on a regular basis. I might take some time to write a post here or there if something comes to me, but for now, the site will go back to its dormant state until I have something that I feel is worthwhile putting up here. Hopefully with some of these changes, that will come sooner rather than later.

Have a good one!

Selective Elimination: A Month-Long Experiment

To begin with, this wasn’t really an experiment. It was actually a month-long punishment that I set for myself for failing to accomplish a goal I’d attempted months ago. Namely that, for the entire month of July, I’m not allowed to use the internet (for browsing, I can use it for keeping JIRA up to date and writing posts like this), play video games, or watch anything that my girlfriend doesn’t watch as well. At least at home. At work I need the internet for my job, so I allowed it there.

The goal of this punishment was two-fold. One, I wanted to really focus on doing something that is more beneficial to my growth as a person than those other things: reading. Two, I wanted to do a trial run of some things I wanted to eliminate that I’d been considering for a while, mostly the internet part. Not much of a punishment overall (though I have been missing my games), but I personally find little value in punishment that doesn’t have a positive effect. The positive effect that I hoped to achieve was to kill my bad habit of surfing the internet/Facebook whenever I couldn’t think of something else to do. And it has worked pretty well.

The Benefits of Elimination

Any productivity expert will tell you that eliminating things is essential to be successful in the important areas of life. The first time it really clicked with me was after reading The 4-Hour Work Week, but it has been reiterated to me time and time again since then. Elimination is getting harder and harder all the time with the advances of our world. Content producers and product makers are figuring out better methods of grabbing our attention. Social networks expand rapidly and notify us of status updates every second. Friends are calling and texting hundreds of times a day to keep in touch or coordinate meetups. As good as these things can be, they are all competing with our time to do things that are potentially more useful.

Obviously, time is the biggest benefit of eliminating the useless things. Every minute you are not spending online or watching TV or playing games is a minute you could be using to learn something or create something of your own. Of course that may not be your goal, but it certainly is mine. I want to leave a mark on the world, and the only way to do that is to create things that other people enjoy or get benefit from. So I definitely want to have as much time to devote to those things as possible.

Another benefit that may surprise people (I certainly was when I heard about it) is that by eliminating useless activities, you are actually helping your brain. Recent scientific research suggests that there is such a thing as bad information, and reading/watching it is actively harmful to your brain. Bad information is a very broad category, but it includes things that either alter your mood in a negative way (mostly things that make you upset or sad) and, to a degree, things that provide nothing to think about (things that are purely for entertainment, aka cat videos). The former is much more destructive than the latter. The internet has become a gigantic cesspool of angst and it is all harmful to you in a very real way. I know most of my friends will say that they enjoy reading comments or posts from people who are “moronic” or “ignorant” because it amuses them. They say it doesn’t upset them. It doesn’t matter, the activity is still harmful, if only from that fact that you are putting other people down, which is a negative attitude. That attitude builds up over time and you get the current state of politics.

On the reverse side, by spending more time on activities that allow you to grow, you become someone who others can admire and depend on. Seriously, you are essentially doubling the benefit to yourself by replacing a bad habit with a good one. Instead of browsing Reddit for a couple hours, you could be learning a new language. It may not immediately come in handy, but when it does, you are going to look like a badass! Instead of sitting on the couch watching a CSI daytime marathon, you could be working on that DIY project that you’ve wanted to do for a while. I guarantee you will feel a lot better about finishing that than realizing you are two hours overdue to make dinner and wondering where the day went.

Choosing What to Eliminate

While I do think that Tim Ferriss’s method of “gun to your head, which one do you choose?” is interesting, it’s not totally necessary. But you do have to do some serious thinking about what you should try to cut back on.

With one exception: the news. I am a very strong advocate that if you eliminate nothing else, you should try avoiding the news at all costs. This is not to say that you cannot still get news from people you know or Facebook/Twitter, but you really should not go out looking for it. If you want to talk about the epitome of bad information, the news is it. Not only is 99% of it completely useless to the average person, the news goes out of its way to be negative at every possible turn. I completely stopped looking at news sites over a year ago, and I couldn’t be happier with that decision. With Facebook and my podcasts I still get the biggest news items, so I’m not completely out of the loop, but it takes up minutes a week to do it that way compared to the hours and hours that most people I know spend. I have heard some people say that not keeping up with the news makes you an ignorant person. Fine by me, you go ahead and keep getting upset over things that you have no control over while I go over here and work on something that I do have control over. Something that makes me happy and will eventually benefit others.

Okay, now that we are all happier people, we can ride on those vibes to even better places. The first place to start looking for things to eliminate is to take inventory of things you do on a regular basis that doesn’t actually give you any enjoyment. This can happen a lot with people because they fall prey to the sunk cost effect. You put a bunch of time into something, but then it stops being fun, but you just keep going with it because you’ve already put so much time into it. To use myself as an example, I’ve read dozens of webcomics and listened to just as many podcasts over the years. With many of them I was able to stop fairly quickly if I didn’t like them, so no real harm done. But then there are others that I read or listened to for years. Eventually one would get to the point where I really didn’t care anymore, but I just kept doing it because I had so much invested in it. You can’t let that control you though. If you really don’t care anymore, you have to let it go. It is hard, but, without exception, I almost immediately forgot about each one once I did finally stop. You won’t miss those things as much as you think you will. If you do end up missing it, you can always go back to it.

The next place I would look is to get rid of things that you will probably never do. That book on your shelf that you got as a gift, but you don’t really have any interest in. That movie that you got 3 years ago on a recommendation, but is still in its shrink wrap. Those 30 games you got during the last Steam sale because they were cheap. That tablet you got, thinking that you would use it on the couch, but you find that you keep thinking of reasons to use it rather than wanting to, so it just sits there on the coffee table. These are all things that I’ve personally dealt with (except the Steam thing, it was more like 10 games). Understand that even if these things are gifts, there is a statute of limitations on how long you have to keep it around before getting rid of it. It’s totally okay to admit that you made a mistake getting something only to realize much later that you’ll never get around to it, or you don’t use it as much as you thought you would. Once you get rid of those things, they will no longer haunt you. Additionally, get rid of things that you don’t intend to ever do again if you have already. Collections don’t impress anyone.

Another step you can take that will make managing things easier is to batch. I explained some of the things I’ve been batching lately a couple weeks ago, and it fully applies here. Look at things that you do regularly (daily or a few times a week), and try to determine if you can possibly batch them together and do them less frequently. For example, I still have a couple webcomics that I like to read, as well as other content that I enjoy. I would read or watch their latest stuff every day they posted something new. For the last few months though, I started batching all of this stuff together into a single block of time that happens once a month. On that one day, I catch up on everything. I don’t miss a single thing (outside of being part of the meta, which I don’t care about anyway for the above reasons), and it takes much less time than it used to.

Once you have done all of those things, then you start going into the really difficult areas of prioritizing the remaining things. At this point they are all things that you enjoy, so it’s going to be a question of deciding which ones you like best, or which ones provide the most benefit. To use myself again as an example, after my experience this month, I am going to have little trouble keeping the internet use down. I find that with each week, I think about getting on the internet less and less, while I think about the things I could be making more and more. The stream of posts these last few weeks are proof of that. And when I reintroduce video games and other media, I’m probably going to be okay with just doing them on the weekends, and to try to keep my activities more varied. I have simply found that I enjoy reading, writing, and learning more than those things. At least for now.

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That’s three weeks in a row! Going to keep trying to post something every Monday, though I imagine coming up with topics will get harder as I go along. Maybe it will be enough to just do status updates more often. We will have to see. Until next Monday.

The Plight of Being a Perfectionist/Completionist

Today while I was crossing off a couple things on my weekly to-do list (which I mentioned last year as a more viable alternative to “today” lists for people who don’t have a lot of things to do on a daily basis), my girlfriend poked fun at me for my need to “check things off.” This certainly wasn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, since I have lots of lists for all sorts of things. There are two reasons I make all these lists: 1) I have a horrible memory, so I will very quickly forget about things that I don’t write down, and 2) it definitely fulfills my completionist tendencies. This led me to the idea for this post.

There is certainly nothing inherently wrong with being a perfectionist or a completionist, but it does come with its challenges. The main challenge being that at some point, you have to accept the fact that you can’t truly accomplish either one, and it is something that you have to accept on your own. I feel like I have been able to mostly control my perfectionist side, but my completionist side is tougher to quell.

While perfectionism and completionism tend to go hand in hand, they are different. Perfectionism has to do with the impulse to keep working on something until it is, in the creator’s mind, perfect. Completionism has to do with the drive to finish a task or a goal with absolutely nothing left to do. It has to do with the former being more subjective, and the latter being more objective. That is why you tend to see perfectionism more often in creative types, and completionism more often in logical types. As an engineer, I get a mix of both sides, which makes it even more difficult.

The Plight

The main difficulty with being either a perfectionist or a completionist is that it’s mentally taxing. With every single thing you do, you just have to do it right. With perfectionists, it’s only right if it’s flawless; with completionists, it’s only right if the whole checklist is accounted for. And if you don’t do it right, then you are a failure, and that failure will eat away at your mind for a long time. So you end up with a lot of people with these tendencies who don’t like committing to things that they are unsure about. If they don’t know that they can do it right, they would rather not do it at all than risk failing.

One of the areas where it’s very easy to see both of these dynamics is in modern video games. Perfectionists will be aiming for flawless scores or runs, while completionists are trying to get all the achievements/trophies, or 100%, every game they play. A lot of times the developers of these games will mix the two so that you can only complete a game by being perfect at it. With those kinds of games, the only way to really win is to not play at all because it stops being fun very quickly.

This leads to the second biggest difficulty, which is that trying to be perfect or trying to complete everything is a gigantic time sink. The opportunity cost can be significant. Of course, for some players, they don’t mind it because the game that they want to be perfect in or do everything in is their game. They don’t care about playing other games besides that one, or maybe they just have a few that they rotate between for months or years. But for those who like having variety (like me), trying to get number 1 on a leaderboard or reach 100% in a 200+ hour game isn’t practical. So that leaves you with two choices: either be frustrated that you can’t master the game to the level you want, or be frustrated that you can’t play as many games as you want. I fight this battle constantly, and it really is frustrating.

The last big difficulty is that the two things above tend to compound on themselves. It’s a very easy spiral to get into where your expectations just get higher and higher, regardless of your rate of success, and your criteria for finishing get out of control. In fact, the more you fail, the harder you tend to be on yourself the next time around, making it that much harder to succeed. If you fail enough times, you don’t feel like taking any risks anymore, which means growth is no longer possible. This is why it is essential to get over that feeling of failure as early as possible.

Getting Over It

Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot that can be said about getting over these hurdles other than you just have to do it at some point if you want to escape the cycle. From my own experience, the only way I’ve been able to stop the tendencies is to just recognize when it happens, accept that I simply can’t let it control me, and then move on. It does get easier with time though. You can potentially get some help with pushing you forward, but I feel that only goes so far. You have to want to get better at it yourself, and having someone else tell you when to let go removes that decision making you need.

I will provide some examples of things that I do to make the decisions easier to make. The perfectionist in me tends to only come out when it comes to making things. When it comes to work, it’s easier to accept that nothing is going to perfect because there are deadlines and things are always going to be changing. It’s still frustrating at times, but I’ve had to do it for so long now that it’s easier to keep going. When it comes to writing, I find that the best way to keep moving is to set time restrictions on writing time, and do as few reviews as possible. With these posts, for example, I set aside about 3 hours to write them, no need to worry about it too much. The next day I will look over it for grammar/spelling mistakes, and then just post it. Is it perfect? Of course not, but at least something is getting done. As any productivity expert will tell you, getting a lot of average things out is always better than never getting out one perfect thing.

The completionist in me is a little harder to keep down. As stated above, I tend to make a lot of lists to keep track of everything that I have going on. And while checking them off is very satisfying, it is still a burden that I don’t really like having to worry about. I look at my backlogs all the time with a feeling of helplessness, knowing that I can never finish them all. So, all I can do is accept that I can’t finish them all. I have to choose which ones are most important to me, and just focus on those. I have to constantly get over the fact that I have spent a good amount of money in the past on things that I will never get to enjoy. And you know what, that’s okay. It’s just money. I learn from that and spend my money more wisely in the future.

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Part of me feels like this post is useless since it doesn’t give any good advice or tips, but the other part of me knows that I had to get it out of my head. Like I said already, it’s not perfect, but it’s something to keep me going. Maybe someday I will hear from a real expert on the topic and I’ll be able to revisit it with better advice.

Until next week.