Hello worklifers,
Have you ever heard about embracing the empowering belief - "B minus is better than A"?
This is one of the beliefs we get coached on in the lifecoachschool in order to motivate us as coaches and encourage our clients to take massive action and offer work we are meant to without attaching ourselves to the outcomes they create on a daily basis.
As a worklifer, I have been able to embrace it to get unstuck almost on a daily and weekly basis. I have to admit it makes me extremely uncomfortable. However, having embraced the belief that discomfort is the currency of growth, it keeps me unstuck. One of the big reasons for discomfort is because it shows up alongside both procrastination and perfectionism. Turns out the fear that my work is not good enough or what people will say keeps us from offering work we have produced, spread and multiply our ideas, and make more decisions on a daily basis.
One simple example, where perfectionism shows up for me is when I get to creating this newsletter. I have so many ideas and so many different ways in which I am trying to ship creative work. The limited thought I catch myself on is - "I think I can spend some more time on it." When I am honest, I can check back to ask myself? What is it that I am really fearful about? Is it that the work is not good enough or what people will say? Both these are then just delaying tactics. Instead, when I embrace B minus is better than A, it is quite wonderful and honestly quite liberating. It always allows me to enjoy the process and take massive action towards the practice and the art of shipping creative work without being attached to the outcome. I love Seth Godin. His latest book the, "The Practice" hits the nail on this. It is absolutely delectable. It has so much wisdom sprinkled all over it. You can gobble it down in a sitting or really savor it slowly like a favorite snack or desert.
Let's look at two limited thoughts around Procrastination or Perfectionism
"My work is not good enough"
Seth Godin sums it beautifully,
"Hoarding is toxic" - A scarcity mindset creates more scarcity, because you are isolating from people who can cheer you on and challenge you to produce more. Instead we can adopt a mindset of abundance. We can choose to realize that creativity is contagious - if you and I are exchanging our best work, our best work gets better. Abundance multiples. Our failure to trust ourselves can consume us. The scarcity cycle turns us selfish and makes us fail to trust others as well.
As a product manager a big part of my worklife is to produce and ship work. The lifecycle of building a product goes through multiple stages. We start by doing customer and market research, collecting user and usage data, understanding pain points, framing problems and hypothesis, running experiments, shipping a V1 product, followed by iterations, and then scaling it to more users. Each of these phases requires one to put forward work which is not perfect. Whenever, I have chosen to say the work is not good enough and tried to hoard it, I have asked myself whether that imposter within me is acting up. When I let imposter lose out to the procrastinator, I hoard my work. When I embrace my self-doubt by not making it mean much about me, I embrace the world with abundance and bring people along the way to fail fast and deliver an improved product.
Did you know recent research estimates that 40% of the workforce has a job that requires innovation, human interaction, and decision making. And so for many of us have this feeling of fraud. It is quite common. As Seth says, when we embrace imposter syndrome instead of working to make it disappear, we choose the productive way forward. The imposter is proof we are innovating, leading and creating.
“What will others say"
Seth Godin says conveys this points creatively:
We can spend a lot of psychic energy willing the weather to be perfect. We can spend just as much time living out of bad weather, suffering ahead of time, knowing the outcome we seek isn't going to happen the way we want it to be. It's easy to see the absurdity of attachment when we're talking about the weather. The thoughtful alternative is resilience. To be okay no matter how the weather turns out, because the weather happens without regard for what we need.
As a product manager the way I have thought about this is from the point of view of the customer. We build products keeping the customer in mind. Now there are going to be customers for whom the product works right away and then there are those for whom we may need to ship another version, or tweak it, or simply build another product. We cannot get attached to the outcome thinking a majority of customers are going to love what we ship. One size does not fit all. You have to go ahead and offer with the mindset of learning and seeing if this is a good product market fit for your target audience. When we think about the customer it is easier to embrace the B minus is better than A. However, when it comes to our own work which could be putting forward an unfinished version of a plan to meet an upcoming deadline, or communicating hard decisions to team members, we tend to feel attached for the outcomes to be perfect. We also tend to feel attached towards managing the feelings of everyone on the team. But the reality is that some people are going to like what you have to say and others aren't. However, you can't make that mean anything about your ability. If you do it from a place of love for the customer and business, and for others it will create the right feelings and help you to land the message with clarity and confidence.
When we get really attached to how others will react to our work, or what they would think we stop focusing on our work and begin to focus on controlling the outcome instead. We are afraid to feel the emotions that would be generated from the rejection.
Seth also writes there are at least 45 ways we sacrifice our work to our fear. I am listing my top 10 favorites from that list.
Hide from deadlines
Expect applause
Catastrophize
Listen to people who are afraid
Don't set ship dates
Confuse perfectionism with quality
Polish your excuses
Hold on tighter as ship date approaches
Taunt yourself
Refuse to listen to generous critics
We don't want people to criticize us and we don't want to disappoint people because of fear. However, we are more comfortable doing it to ourselves. We end up disappointing ourselves and rejecting our work before others do. That leads to that scarcity mindset. Underlying that scarcity mindset hides the fear of rejection. The way to combat these two is to generate abundance. You can try generating abundance by embracing B minus is better than A. It will allow you take massive action towards practicing shipping creative work and taking more decisions. The act of taking massive action against this belief results in worthy fails vs. escape fails (where we don't show up for ourselves or for the work). When we stop obsessing about results and get detached from the outcome, we truly enjoy the process. When you choose abundance the reward you give to yourself is that of following through on your word as you will miss less deadlines, catastrophize less, prove your fears are irrational and build the resilience to listen to the generous critics more often. This ultimately results in self-confidence as you end up having your own back, no matter what the outcome. Because, you believed in yourself to follow the practice.
Maithili Vijay Dandige