Eighty Percent of the Secret to Success is in This Post

There is always a better way to do everything.

Whatever project you are working on, someone will always tell you how to do it better, faster, easier, cheaper.  You will figure out a better way to do it, as soon as you are done.  Someone, somewhere, ran a research project that you could’ve used to shave 10 days of your project.  A professor in a state university wrote a paper about your project three years ago.

All this information is available to you today.  You can find anything on the Internet if you search long enough.  Twitter exposes your “failure” 100 times faster than before and you get 20 times more “suggestions” on how to do it better.

Is a finished, unoptimized project any less finished because it could be done better? Would you consider it re-doing it? Should you?

In the early days in my career as a consultant one of my mentors told me something that has become one of my maxims.  As a consultant, it is your job to complete a job to 80% perfection and then deploy it.  The other 20%, if necessary, will come later.  If it is not necessary, then you are 100% done.

Perfection is not for the real-world – it works only in Academia.

It stuck with me, because it is true.

How close to 80% perfect are you today?