Unhealthy perfection

I recall a promotion one summer years ago that McDonalds ran where you could win a free poster of the World Series Cricket teams. You didn’t have to buy anything to get the prize, but you did have to entrench the brand in your head; by reciting the Big Mac “Two all-beef patties, etc etc…” jingle.

The catch was that you had to do it in 4 seconds or less.

Wanting that poster and knowing what I had to do to get it, I practiced the jingle over and over, entrenched it in my head, until I could nail it in under 4 seconds. Then I visited Maccas, did the job and claimed my reward.

That was my first ever (memorable) exposure to a sales promotion and looking back, it was also a point where I can identify such a thing as an unhealthy obsession with perfection.

See, when I say I practiced that jingle, I mean it. It was many weeks and practice runs before I could stop the clocks with all of the words (audibly) inside 4 seconds. I wasn’t going to attempt the task or act toward the goal until I’d perfected the criteria and delivery.

So you can imagine my frustration when after weeks of practice (almost to the end of the summer’s World Series Cricket comp) and on stepping into the queue behind other kids to deliver my perfect line, every other kid got a poster no matter what.

They’d mostly get the jingle right though not always. As far as meeting the time criteria and though some achieved it, it may as well have not existed. The others were far from perfect yet were still getting the same prize that I did even though they weren’t as prepared or perfect as I was.

It occurred to me, even in that moment that I could’ve had my poster much sooner (at the beginning of the season), had I just taken hold of the information I (and everyone else) had and executed my plan. The worst that could’ve happened; I’d get another chance.

The point is, you can sit on the sidelines, endlessly preparing because you believe that perfection is the only catalyst that’ll get your idea firing. Or you can assemble the most basic and fundamental elements of the idea, jump in and start crafting it to whatever perfection it is that’s required.

As a postscript, I’m not suggesting the pursuit of perfection is a bad thing. The high concept of perfection should always be a vision when you’re developing any idea. It’s only bad when it stops you from taking any steps at all when you should be.

** Republished from The Polished Turd (www.thepolishedturd.com), first published September 2010