Bravery over Perfection

Is it really so perfect to be a perfectionist?

I’m back!!

Okay, so this subtitle “What's so perfect about being a perfectionist?” just sounds like a shower thought, but I’ve really wondered this for as long as I can remember.

[Take a shot for every time I say the word perfect in this piece]

In order to have been an engineer, be a decent academic performer, or start a company, it feels like the successful archetype would be an organized, highly detail-oriented person. But… I’m the exact opposite.

If you saw the way I handle laundry, or any of my notebooks in grade school, you’d wonder how I was ever even capable of getting any work done. I used to use every new school year as an opportunity to “get my shit together” and see if I could organize all my notebooks & folders, while maintaining my bedroom and locker with minimal clutter. Inevitably, my stuff would always end up all over the place, class notes mixed into the wrong subject notebooks, I’d have a designated “laundry chair” to throw on my clean clothes in the mornings, and, of course, the soul crushing “everything folder” that would get so fat that it was about to rip apart.

Ironically, everyone who I’ve ever been extremely close to has been nothing short of spotless.

Part of why I’ve always been unable to keep up a constant sense of organization is because I find myself thriving in chaos. I know that just sounds like an excuse, but I really find my brain at its highest functioning, productivity, and creativity, when I’m exercising multiple streams of thought or am exploring new, highly complicated ideas. So when I phrase it like that, it makes sense that I would start a company and wear a million different hats.

I know that there’s an inherent level of clarity you have when you’re an organized person, but it is far from my belief system that we have to be perfectionists to build a life leading to high quality outcomes.

Hear me out.

Instead of dismissing certain qualities as a hindrance to your success, doesn’t it make more sense to find pathways that allow you to exercise your unique strengths?

Six months from the moment I woke up with a seed of an idea, I planted it, nurtured it, and saw it come to life to share with the world as Transcendence Coffee. The reason this was possible, is because I didn’t fixate intensely on if the product was perfect enough to be received by others. Instead, I started small, got feedback and kept iterating, knowing that my product sense and vision was going to drive us to scale. I knew that, along the way, there would be many mistakes, scrappy & labor-intensive stretches, and many questions left unanswered. But the solution to building a company, and trying to build quickly (especially on a bootstrapped budget), is to build without the fear of making small mistakes. We often never have the full picture, and making strategic, calculated decisions without conclusive information makes for successful startup founders.

When you’re founding a company for the first time, most people are incredibly doubtful of you. The early days are not glamorous, and this school of thinking is often seen by perfectionists as “irresponsible” or “reckless”. Women, especially, are often outnumbered in rooms with technical complexity, leadership, or venture capital, so there’s an additional added pressure to be “perfect” in order to compete/compare with our male cohorts. Quite frankly, this is BS.

I remember some of my Electrical Engineer labs in college where I’d be the only woman in the room, and my TA would hover over me assuming I’d be the most incompetent or most likely to “fail”. I hope to be a voice of strength to any other women who have experienced this baseless pressure to be “perfect”, and instead champion that we’re courageous enough to be in a room full of damn men, trying to get our circuit working just like everyone else!!

The truth of the matter is, my inherent lack of perfectionism has enabled my wildest ideas coming to fruition, and has challenged me to thrive in rooms that “I have no business being in”. I wake up supercharged to push our company forward and take chances on my ideas, even big ones. Perfectionism, in this environment, can often lead to caution, which can make you too late to take action, too afraid to be a leader, or too slow to build sustainable business.

This is not to say that attention to detail isn’t an important quality. We can build teams and partnerships in our organization so that our strengths & weaknesses compliment one another. The success of our company actually comes from the incredible attention to detail and creativity of my co-founder, Lisa, paired with my high intensity commitment to scale and be strong operators.

When our community tells us we nailed the branding on the first try, it’s entirely because I have the right partner that compliments the skills that I lack. But, at no point, have I diminished my own style of working or way of thinking. I found that big corporate environments don’t cultivate my highest potential or my strongest suits, and launching Transcendence has.

I hope that whatever you want to work on, you tap into whatever your strengths are with pride, and always find a team that both challenges and encourages that. Even if you’re far from perfectionism.

Shout out to Reshma Saujani for championing this concept on the big stage and encouraging girls to code.