Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Welcome to design in confidence, hosted by me, Stefan ability, assessor pre coach speaker, and facilitator. In this episode that we talk about letting go of perfection and accepting understanding what good enough is because this is one of the learnings I wish I knew early in my career on how mindfulness and design can be creative, confidence and management alive in confidence. I believe that most of my drawings are bad, especially those made quickly during workshops. Even if people are mind blown by them, I can hear a voice in my head that says it's not good enough. I talk a lot about this in episode one. And I could talk about these more and more because mindfully paying attention to what happens in my head makes me understand all the reasons why I always think I'm not good enough. Like mother affection is society expeditions comparison with others, and also having a sense of accomplishment.
Speaker 0 00:00:59 But I'm going to leave these for future episodes because in this episode, I want to talk about accepting understanding what good enough is. We tend to focus on the word, good in a position to great or perfect, but I believe that the key word is enough. So in this episode, we talk about good enough or what. So if you let me feel that your work is never good enough and always try to be perfect. And you try to juggle between these two and that brings it either get stuck or take too many risks. I will tell you whether we should have early in my career beside myself for so many other people paralyzing or having these problems at that because they get stuck on the potential risks of a project, or they try to achieve perfection before presenting something to others. But they're also seeing problems on the other side of the spectrum, on people that embrace too much, the mentality of good enough is better than perfect.
Speaker 0 00:02:01 And that's why I want to clarify what good enough is. Not because enough is seen sometime like contenting yourself with something in complete, not functional and not sustainable in the long term. And I want to focus on the sustainability aspect. It's not about just the environment, it just, how much an idea can carry you forward in time. And that because I've saw people doing something good enough, they were just good enough to say yes, I've done it. I was efficient. I did it without wasting a lot of time. And now I don't need to think about it anymore. A good enough mentality means starting in perfectly. Yes, because you assume it will impact positively in the short-term and then you got to come back to it to improve it. Next time. If you don't plan to check your assumption of positive impact and build on it, you're not doing good enough.
Speaker 0 00:02:53 You're just doing a bad job. So we'll see now how making something good enough means mindfully accepting and controlling the resources you have, the progress and the impact you can have and the learnings you can gather. So the next time you will make it better enough. Let's look at these in detail. Good enough for what good enough to move forward. You need to start somewhere that happens when you have an idea or an opinion, they will become more real. Once you bring it to life with a sort of medium, whether it's a sentence or a drawing or whatever you use to represent what you had in mind. My suggestion to you is to accept that you have an amazing imagination. Most of the time, you will imagine something realistic and perfect in your head, but once you bring it to life, probably won't be perfect anymore in confidence.
Speaker 0 00:03:50 That happens to me a lot of times when I bring my ideas to life, because sometimes I'm not able to execute exactly that year. I'm not able to draw perfectly where they're have in mind or use the tools to represent it. Sometimes I had to make some feasibility compromise if I have an amazing idea. Well, in reality, something is not going to be exactly like that because to achieve it, you need a lot of money or you need some technology that you cannot have a whatever, but also because the more you think about idea, the more you're going to have others support and a point of view, then what you're going to have this call, that imperfection that you weren't aware of in mind, you're going to see some areas of improvement and you're going to discover a new unknowns and that's normal. Accept that without judgment.
Speaker 0 00:04:38 Let it go once you let it go. You can focus on the present because once you have in mind is the past is potentially is in the future. And what you have just created is in the present, focus on the present and knowledge, and now you have something good enough to move forward because now people can access what you only had in mind before. This is where they, you collaborate with teammates, they call those users. So for example, my ideally drawings during workshops, they were good enough to create a shared understanding, to make sure that people were talking about the same things very much in the same things about how our service or mental work, both is good enough for people to experience what you had in mind, whether they're users or their experts, that people that you collaborate with so that you can observe the impact of your idea on them.
Speaker 0 00:05:29 Let's look at them in detail. Good enough for what good enough to impact. So many of my bad leaks did drawings were anyway good enough to show them to users and ask them to imagine how they will feel, do, and think while experiences those interactions. I keep bringing up the example of the drawings. It's the same with your big idea of, uh, an app or a business, instead of trying to learn something big and perfect, learn something small, but good enough to start improving people's life. And if you produce correctly, which part of your big idea to start with could actually become a game changer for your users. So in this podcast, I don't have a legal team to husk to on whether it's okay for me to mention a company name, but I know there's going to be good enough for me to say on this podcast that a small startup in the UK disrupted this financial market by creating an app, they meet easier for friends to split bills.
Speaker 0 00:06:33 It was a game changer for them, the improves people life, but also started to generate revenues the start up, but that would not have happened if the startup we're thinking, oh, hang on. Our big vision here is to build a bank. We need to do that perfectly. And then launch into the market. They didn't do that. They start with something simple. That was good enough to impact people, life engineering, revenue. And now there are a bank and only because that was good enough to move forward and impact people life, but also to learn new things on how to build a bank. Let's look at that more in detail. Good enough for what good enough to learn after making Santi, they were just good enough. The bank had the money to bring more expertise on, but also I use a community to engage with and ask them if what Dan was really good enough and how to make it better.
Speaker 0 00:07:31 But also if you want to deliver a design, something, it's an end to end process every time. So instead of taking many years to build the perfect bank and the luncheon in the market, they decided to make many end to end processes shorter that allowed them often to launch something, a piece of these big puzzle. And this could be more opportunity for the team to understand how to work better together. Every time we complete a task, not only that motivates us because we get a sense of accomplishment volts. So every work in cycle, the close by finishing something, you can ask yourself, what did I do? Well, what can I do better next time? And this is key because we're really good. Enough phase is good enough to design your confidence. Doing something for the first time is scary. Change is scary. It's normal. They are long distances that we have to take to innovate and change our lives.
Speaker 0 00:08:34 So it's okay if instead of gathering the courage to make a big, perfect leap, we broke it down into smaller steps that are good enough to move forward, to check if we are going in the right direction to gather more resources and to learn so that then we can be more confident in our journey. It's okay. If you don't have enough confidence for a big leap, take small steps that are good enough with what you've got. Let's look at that more in detail. Good enough for what good enough with what you've got. Just the knowledge that there are limited resources. And I talk about my knee, the learnings, you have the expertise, the number of customers, but also their trust of those that work with you. Those they need to endorse your idea. Mindfully accepting the resources that we have available makes us resourceful. Resourcefulness means making the best of the resource.
Speaker 0 00:09:38 We have not stretching our resources as if we had more accepting the resource that you have means owning those, the limit, you, but also make the best of those three. And that's going to be different. Whether you are in a startup in big organization or dependent by the industry you are in, for example, in the workshops I was talking to you about, I had a limited time bolt. So the expectations were pretty low. Nobody was expecting me to create the 16 chapel. When I was working a starter, we only had a few customers and the budget was limited, but also the stake of making something bad. Flower reputation was very low compared to work with big organizations that because they have many customers, their stakeholder position is really, really high, but they have more resources like people in time, which allows them to create safe spaces where ideas can be tested while other resources are invested to deliver that the business as usual, but also not accepting their associates.
Speaker 0 00:10:42 You have being good to stretch them and stretching them is what brings you to have a bad work-life balance or to become a stressful manager leader because expect too much from people. But also our confidence is one our resources. And if we stretch it and we feel all the confidence, we don't test things earlier, we don't do enough research. It means that we're going to take too many risks. Let's look at that in detail. Good enough for what good enough to not make things worse, you might say, well, it's easier for you in my workplace. Things need to be perfect, not just good enough. And I'm going to apply. Sure. Are you doing something like building a space, rocket or performing a half surgery? If not, and you feel in this way, probably you or your boss need to relax a bit and understand what is the worst case scenario.
Speaker 0 00:11:45 But also if you do space rockets or perform a heart surgery, if you never tried with something just good enough to learn and build your confidence, probably you're taking too many risks. As the astronaut. Chris Hadfield says, not Austin launches their rockets with a finger crossed. Even those who do fly a build rockets will perform her surgery. They don't suddenly do it. Also nuts train with some today, just good enough like shadowing someone we're expert or using simulation or butterfly in simpler aircraft before any other force piece agencies, as a whore, sending a rocket around the orbit is just good enough. The space agencies want to go on planets and colonize them. So what they're doing now is just good enough for them to understand how to get there so that they build the confidence, you know, where they, in the first interplanetary tree, they won't be there with the finger cross because then it means taking too many risks.
Speaker 0 00:12:50 And if you struggled to think about it now think that this is not the start they started with Sunday. That was good enough. Like the Gemini missions were for the OSR, not going into orbits, but doing the numbers two into bags who was good enough to space exploration. Good enough is not about making something imperfect. It's about managing risks while using limited resources. Good enough means using our creative confidence of taking enough risks and using enough resources to make something and move us forward enough, to impact and learn so that we grow our creative confidence in us for taking more risks and using more resources. Next time, I'm going to repeat that again because it was long and they have many times the word enough in it. Good enough means using our creative confidence of taking enough risks and using enough resources to make something that move us forward enough, impact and learn so that we grow our creative confidence enough for taking more risks and using more resources next time.
Speaker 0 00:14:03 So ask yourself, how can I build my confidence by doing something that is good enough to move forward, get the learnings and check if I'm going into direction and let me know how it goes. Also, let me know if this episode was good enough or not to help you so that you will help me by growing Mike, really confidence for future episodes, go to designing confidence.com. There. You can see how to contact me and also find links to relevant resources and people from the sparring for these dogs. And he feel fun. This aspiring, please leave a review and share this podcast. Tell people why you think this podcast help your creative confidence, become someone else, a safe space to talk about these topics and to find support and building their creative confidence.
Speaker 1 00:14:51 Because if you've got this far, I'm sure you're a great listener, which I thank you for. And now he stayed for me to shut up. So you can listen to your own thoughts after this episode, remember to thank yourself for the time you spent to learn and grow up.
