Hi folks,
Yesterday we started by talking about Raoul Wallenberg Place, the name of 15th Street that I noticed during my bike rides into work.
We talked about Wallenberg’s amazing and inspiring activities during the height of WWII, placing himself in harm’s way to save tens of thousands of innocent lives. In the course of doing so, he demonstrated numerous admirable qualities, some of which we can try to emulate. Yesterday we talked about improvisation and confidence. I have two more to touch upon, one of which is:
Acceptance of imperfection
This is perhaps the saddest part of Wallenberg’s story. He couldn’t save everybody, so he had to prioritize as best he can. In the case study, he chose to save the youngest first – “I’m sorry… I want to save a nation.” It wasn’t the ideal outcome, but it was the best he could do. Had he tried to save everybody, he would have failed to save anybody.
And how is this relevant to our work at our agency?
We can go way deep on this, but the gist is that much of Western philosophy argues that perfection doesn’t exist in this plane of reality. Plato bucketed concepts of ideals/perfectionism as Forms, St. Augustine called them the Intelligible, but the idea is the same – nothing you can perceive with your bodily senses can be considered perfect. Now, that’s certainly arguable, but I submit that nothing we do here at work represents a counter-argument to the concept. For as much as we should all strive to do the best we can, achieving perfection probably isn’t in the cards. So that then means, in the context of our daily activities:
^ This guy gets it. If we keep waiting for perfection, we’re simply stalling. Perfectionism isn’t an admirable trait when it obstructs progress. Instead, we should listen to Skeletor:
And for as unnatural as it is to mix memes with the inherent reverence reserved for somebody like Wallenberg, I think he’d agree with the message. We’re not going to achieve perfection, but that shouldn’t stop us from making progress. Instead, let’s focus on our trajectory and make sure we’re headed in the right direction. We don’t need a plan to get us to the ideal state, but we should always be executing a plan to get us closer and closer.
Rex