K. Joia Houheneka is a global leader in luxury entrepreneurship. She is the founder of Club Elevate+Aspire+, an application-only exclusive community for entrepreneurs building high-end, premium, and/or luxury businesses.
How to maintain your commitment to the highest levels of excellence with full integrity – and not succumb to the temptations of unhealthy “perfection-seeking”.
“To be luxury is to be the best – by human standards. Aim for very real greatness. That is your birthright as a human being. Don’t let your dreams get swept away into the unreality of ‘perfection.’” (From “Quotes on Luxury” by K. Joia Houheneka)
The truth is, you should have been sitting reading this article months ago. Maybe even years ago. But I spent too much time staring at a blank screen and finding other, “more important” things to do.
I’m not a perfectionist about everything. But I am a Recovering Perfectionist when it comes to writing.
It’s left me frozen at the keyboard too many times when I could have been doing and learning – and maybe even helping to change lives for the better (including my own) if I had actually strung words together and hit “submit”.
I think perfectionism is an especially tempting trap for those of us who hold high standards for our work, our reputations, and our lives as a whole. But what I’ve come to learn the hard way is that if the quest for perfection results only in paralysis and stagnation, then everyone loses.
In many cases, done IS better than some vision of “perfect” (especially when “perfect” is probably non-reality-based anyway.)
However, just knowing theoretically that I should alter my approach, has not meant in practice that I could just give up my self-sabotaging perfectionistic tendencies overnight. Like all those who are Recovering, I’m sure it’s a lifelong journey.
That said, I have discovered several helpful perspectives and practices that keep me on track to produce excellence while avoiding the snares of perfectionism.
Now if only I had actually delivered some version of this article to you years ago, we might have all learned these sooner:
Embracing life’s nature as imperfect, impermanent and incomplete
I’ve become fascinated by the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi sabi. While a deep understanding of its theory, history, and practice I’m sure takes years to master (especially if mastery involves the Shu Ha Ri process of ingraining the rules, breaking them, and ultimately creating your own), I have found benefit just from a cursory study and a reminder from wabi sabi to seek out the beauty in that which is fleeting and breaking.
As author Beth Kempton discusses in her book Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life, while wabi sabi is difficult to precisely define, essentially:
“…the true beauty of wabi sabi lies not in things but in the very nature of life itself.
Wabi sabi is an intuitive response to beauty that reflects the true nature of life. Wabi sabi is an acceptance and appreciation of the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete nature of everything. Wabi sabi is a recognition of the gifts of simple, slow, and natural living.”
Wabi sabi prompts me to remember that the nature of life itself is change, that there is no final destination of “perfection” to which we ever “arrive”. Wabi sabi encourages me to seek out the splendor in the incessant activity of life that is perfect only in being imperfectly in flux, and ideally growing and evolving.
Also, significantly, there is an ancient Japanese art form that derives from the wabi sabi philosophy, an art of mending broken pottery and statues with a gorgeous golden filling. It is an art known as Kintsugi. Although most people would throw away something broken, Kintsugi reminds me that scars can make an object (and a life!) even more beautiful, as those battle marks tell a unique story and demonstrate fortitude over adversity and time.
This ancient wisdom presses me to remember that life’s quest ought to be toward excellence and high standards, not some impossible state of “perfection.”
The important distinction between high standards and perfectionism
High standards are ambitious yet achievable goals. High standards reflect a desire to do your best and to commit to a journey of continuous learning and growth. When you have high standards, you’re motivated by purpose and commitment to your values, with an understanding that mistakes are just “missed takes,” an inevitable feature on the path of growth and development.
Perfectionism, however, is characterized by an unhealthy pursuit of unrealistic flawlessness. Perfectionists, sadly, are often in the moment driven more by fear of failure than they are by the desire to grow (especially if that might mean looking less-than-brilliant in the process). When you give in to perfectionism, you tend to be overly critical of yourself and others, especially given the nature of the circumstances. Dangerously, this could be a blow to an otherwise healthy life of self-esteem, and it could lead to burnout with ramifications lasting years if not a lifetime.
5 ways to pursue excellence while escaping the perfectionism trap
Probably the first step to combatting destructive perfectionist tendencies is to admit that you are, indeed, a Recovering Perfectionist. After that, here are 5 of the most helpful practices I have found that keep me focused on producing excellence without the pitfalls of perfectionism:
1. Be ambitious, then live by the 80% approach and letting small bad things happen
“Set the intention to be extraordinary”. This is one of my favorite quotes, because if you aim high and make a forthright effort to do what it takes, even if you miss the lofty target, your results can still be superlative.
Nowadays, I make a point to be ambitious and then implement what master coach Dan Sullivan (of “Who Not How” fame) calls the 80% approach. As he puts it, instead of obsessing over trying to get things “perfect” –
“Get the first 80 percent of any project or task done as quickly as possible, and then delegate the second 80 percent to someone else for further improvement. This brings the overall project to 96 percent by using multiple people’s best abilities to achieve a superior outcome.
Two mental traps that paralyze us:
Perfectionism — refusal to decide or commit.
Procrastination — refusal to take action.
Solution? Do the first 80% as quickly as possible!
Why? Your 80% is often good enough or better than what others expected — especially when you're using your Unique Ability.”
It’s important to note, for many projects, there is no 100% perfection because you’re always learning. For example, even if I tried to make this article 100% perfect today, in five years I will probably (hopefully!) find all sorts of things to change as I only learn more.
Better to set an ambitious target and try to achieve what I would deem a B- effort today, because not only will I learn quicker, my ambitious 80% can still be phenomenally valuable and start to make real impact in the world ASAP.
Also, if I quickly complete my 80%, I can often bring in someone with a complementary set of talents (i.e. a good editor), and if they contribute 80% to that final 20%, we can reach a strong 96% very quickly. This is practically the definition of “smarter not harder”: getting superlative results in a short time frame that feels nearly effortless by leveraging everyone’s unique strengths.
In this vein, another practice I have found helpful is Tim Ferriss’s suggestion to build the habit of “letting small bad things happen”. As he has described it:
“Even when you’re not traveling the world, develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things, whether important tasks or true peak experiences. If you do force the time but puncture it with distractions, you won’t have the attention to appreciate it.
What is the one goal, if completed, that could change everything?
What is the most urgent thing right now that you feel you “must” or “should” do?
Can you let the urgent “fail” — even for a day — to get to the next milestone with your potential lifechanging tasks?
What’s been on your “to-do” list the longest? Start it first thing in the morning and don’t allow interruptions or lunch until you finish.
Will “bad” things happen? Small problems will crop up, yes. A few people will complain and quickly get over it. BUT, the bigger picture items you complete will let you see these for what they are–minutiae and repairable hiccups.
Make this trade a habit. Let the small bad things happen and make the big good things happen.”
I’ve learned that by focusing on the big moves, I can quickly produce big results, the ones that actually make a difference. And the small things can often get fixed later anyway (if it’s even necessary).
2. Ground your identity in curiosity
I find one of the reasons that perfectionism is so tempting is because it’s a normal human experience to feel that your identity is bound up in your work, that the quality of the work defines who you are, and so you want it to be “perfect” so that you can be “perfect”.
While I do think that making your personal brand synonymous with excellence is a worthwhile goal, this doesn’t mean having to give in to some notion of unrealistic “perfection”. In fact, this could just get you stuck in a fixed mindset, rather than a growth mindset, and ultimately derail your attempts toward true excellence.
I find it important to remind myself that my identity is also that of an explorer.
I remind myself that curiosity is a key value and virtue for a flourishing human life.
Interestingly, a life of luxury and excellence is filled with seeming paradoxes and this is one: the paradox of personal integrity AND personal evolution. Yes, you want to hold and keep true to a set of principles. But one of the principles of human flourishing is continuous learning, so you also want to keep actively open to possible revision and change.
I do my best to come up with a good idea and produce a great work. But I am not the idea nor the work. I’m the explorer who’s currently found this idea to be the best thus far, and I’ve put it forward, for now, in this work. But as long as I’m living, it’s all still a work in progress. And I’m always asking questions to try to make it even better.
3. Fall in love with the process
“Love the messy process and let the brilliance emerge.”
When you do any kind of creative work, whether it’s making art or founding a startup, it’s common to come up against what Ira Glass identified as the gap between your taste for refined results and your current abilities. As he observed,
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”
When you care about excellence, you want your work to be a brilliantly polished end product. But to get there, you generally have to go through a messy process. In fact, those who can fall in love with the messiness of the process are most likely (if they can keep learning through all the iterations) to produce the most exquisite brilliance in the end. It’s another one of those paradoxes of excellence and luxury.
One of my favorite parables that captures this lesson comes originally from the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:
“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
The moral: practice and learning trumps mere theorizing about perfection every time.
4. Prioritize your overall health & well-being
I consider myself a highly ambitious person. And my ambition extends beyond just my work to my life as a whole.
Yes, I want an empire business that creates massive impact, but I want to ensure it is also a lifestyle business. I won’t settle for anything less.
However, there have been times when I’ve let myself get too caught up in “trying to make my work perfect” to the detriment of my health and relationships. However, especially now that I’m a mother, I keep my priorities and boundaries firmly in place.
Luckily, these priorities don’t have to conflict, and what I’ve learned is that if anything they form a virtuous spiral. Through my training in Peak Performance Coaching with the Flow Research Collective, I discovered that there are seven foundational practices to peak performance rooted in Positive Psychology. Not only do these seven make it easier for me to get into a flow state so that I can feel my best and perform my best at work, they also keep me focused daily on my overall well-being.
These seven daily practices are:
Sleep
Nutrition/Hydration
Exercise
Mindfulness
Gratitude
Supportive Relationships
Time in Nature
5. Remember that flaws add character & humanity
Luxury goods aim to be the best. But best does not mean perfect. In fact, many luxury goods deliberately incorporate certain flaws, particularly flaws that add a sense of character and humanity to an otherwise sterile manufactured product. This is the second of the Anti-Laws of Luxury Marketing that Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien feature in their magnum opus on luxury strategy: 2: “Does your product have enough flaws?”- Idiosyncrasies and imperfections in a luxury product add charm and a human touch.
They give the examples from luxury watches and luxury automobiles:
“If you were to buy some of the famous brands of a luxury watch, you would probably be warned that it loses two minutes every year. The flaw is not only known, it is assumed – one could say that that is both its charm and its guarantee of authenticity. It is the specific and singular nature of the movement that is responsible for that. For luxury watchmakers like adding complications, indeed seek them out in their endless quest of art for art’s sake. This is the ‘madness’ touch that goes beyond perfection and make people collect them. Let’s look at some of the watches that Hermès has to offer, where the time is indicated by just four figures: 12, 3, 6 and 9. So you have to guess the time – as if knowing the time accurately was somehow unimportant, even pleasure-killing and dehumanizing. These watches are certainly far removed from those state-of-the-art precision chronograph watches, for luxury brands are not interested in being the leader in utilitarian or functional comparisons – primarily they are hedonistic and symbolic. Their ‘flaw’ is a source of emotion. In the world of luxury, the models and the products must have character or personality. In the world of automobiles, a Ferrari is anything but a perfect car if you like easy, smooth and silent driving; that is why people would do anything to own one. Every model forces its owner to accept its flaws.”
My personal favorite example of this phenomenon is handwritten letters. No handwritten letter will ever have the typographical perfection you get from mechanical or digital printing – and this is precisely its charm. Especially as our world becomes increasingly automated, there’s something beautifully genuine and authentic about that which is imperfectly human.
An important caveat: Sometimes “perfection” is context-bound, valid and valuable
Throughout this article, I’ve been discussing “perfectionism” as the unhealthy pursuit of an unrealistic vision that often leads to paralysis, over-criticism, and burnout. For those of us with the tendency to err on the side of pushing ourselves too hard, it’s a common problem that warrants continuous monitoring.
However, it is also possible to err too much toward the other side, concluding that since some Platonic “perfection” is impossible, one shouldn’t even try.
It is important to note that there are sometimes ways to define “perfection” in measurable, context-bound ways, and that one often should do this and strive mightily to meet those high, hard measurable goals. For instance, it is absolutely admirable how Olympic athletes dedicate themselves to excel at a particular sport, often counting perfection as a medal win or a world-record that comes down to a fraction of a second. Or as an everyday example, if you promise to meet with someone at a certain time, you ought to do everything within your power to keep your word and be perfectly on time (if not a few minutes early).
“Perfection” can be a valid and highly valuable goal, so long as it is delineated and made specific in terms that are reality-based. This is a life of high standards. And as far as I’m concerned, this way of excellence is the only kind of life I find worthy of pursuing.
If you too seek excellence and high standards and are an entrepreneur committed to translating that vision into a world-class high-end / luxury brand, then our community at Club Elevate+Aspire+ could be the “home” you never knew you needed.
Here’s how you can apply today to join us.
K. Joia Houheneka, Luxury Travel Advisor & Excellence Coach
K. Joia Houheneka is on a mission to Elevate Luxury to make luxury synonymous with excellence. She has a background as the owner of a luxury travel agency, Delve Travel. However, much of her current work involves coaching entrepreneurs in her bespoke method that combines luxury business strategy, training in flow states & self-actualization, and growth-focused travel – it is designed for those who are serious about achieving excellence and flourishing across all areas of life. Entrepreneurs with high-end, premium, or luxury businesses are invited to apply for a Complementary Level membership to Club Elevate+Aspire+ to discover more.
