Perfectionism Archive - This Moment Counts

Impress less. Connect more.

Most people overthink presentations.

They wrestle with every word, unsure which one will land best.

They polish every slide for hours, unsure which layout will wow the audience most.

They smooth out their body language, unsure which pose will signal authority strongest.

But none of that really matters if there’s no connection first.

The best presentations aren’t a show.
Not even a performance.

Actually, I’d say they feel like conversations.

Much like the one you’d have with your best friend at the bar.

A real one.
The kind where you talk like yourself.
Where you skip the clever lines and just say what you mean.
Where you connect with them, not just talk at them.

Mirror that and you’ll do fine on a stage.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

PS: I spoke about this (and many other things) with Mike Carruthers on the Imperfect Creativespodcast. Here’s a little video snippet about this specific thought.

The Shift

We’ve all been there.

The endless planning, refining, and tweaking. The meetings where strategies are discussed and decisions feel just out of reach.

You feel like you’re almost there—just a little more time, a little more clarity, and it’ll all fall into place.

But here’s the thing: it never feels like it’s quite enough.

The clarity you seek is always one step further away.

Plus: All the planning in the world doesn’t matter until you decide to act.

It’s easy to get caught in the cycle of preparation—tuning ideas, debating decisions, feeling productive without ever moving forward.

But growth doesn’t happen in planning.
Impact not in debates and discussions.

The shift happens when you move. When you take the leap, despite the uncertainty. When the idea becomes more than just a thought and starts shaping reality.

Tomorrow, The PATH to Strategic Impact goes live.
It stops the tweaking for me.
I hope it can stop the overthinking for you.

And I hope it can help you light the path to a bigger impact.

What’s the step you’re about to (finally) make?

Attention to detail

Attention to detail is not the same thing as perfectionism.
You can value the former and still beware of the latter.

Attention to detail means caring for the little things and getting them right. It’s about taking the time that’s required to make it just right, not perfectly right. When you pay attention to detail you’ll commit to shipping but refuse to rush a job.

Perfectionism means that you don’t care about time at all. You can’t because you will only ship when it’s perfect. It takes as long as it takes … which is probably forever. That’s why as a perfectionist, you can’t commit to shipping.

Ultimately, perfectionists don’t really care for the thing but for themselves. They want to spare themselves the embarrassment of shipping something that leaves space for criticism. They hate criticism.

Paying attention to detail shifts the focus away from yourself and onto the experience of your audience. Which can’t happen when you don’t ship.

Attention to detail

Donald Knuth pays $2.56 for every error that you spot in one of his books. Checks are rarely cashed, though, as the receivers prefer to keep the check as a badge of honor. You know, it’s pretty hard to spot an error in one of Knuth’s books. There aren’t many.

And that’s despite the fact that the books are enormous. “The Art of Computer Programming” alone (which, for computer scientists, is similar in status to the bible), has currently more than 4000 pages.

Knuth doesn’t stop there. For any coding error that people find in one of his programs “Metafont” or “TeX” (a widely used document system in academia), Knuth doubled the reward each year until it reached $327.68. Since 1995, no errors were found in TeX.

Perfectionism has a bad reputation today because it’s often misused as an excuse for not shipping your work.

But perfectionism is not the same thing as attention to detail. Knuth does ship and he cares for the details – more than almost anyone else.

My feeling is that we all can use a bit more attention to detail.

What’s attention to detail worth for you?

Posts in Tag: Perfectionism

Impress less. Connect more.

The Shift

Attention to detail

Attention to detail