Walking in from my car last night, I spotted this amazing spider’s web.

This web is absolute perfection – it’s perfectly suited for catching insects. It’s perfectly strong. It’s invisible to the spider’s prey and perfectly located to catch them under the light. It’s even beautiful to look at.

Spider web under one of my driveway lights

I started thinking about whether or not the spider that made this web worried about whether or not it was good enough or pretty enough or clever enough or if other nearby spiders made better webs.

My guess is no, the spider doesn’t think about any of these things. I’ll bet the spider didn’t wait until it could spin a perfect web, whatever one’s definition of THAT might be. The spider just got out there and spun its web.

Working in mostly male environments, I found the women I worked with often literally stuck in the spider web of making sure everything is perfect before they shared it with anyone else.

Now, I help women like them to make deep inner changes so they no longer feel that pressure to produce 100% perfect work 100% of the time, changes that increase their confidence, their ability to collaborate and their ability to focus that drive for perfection on those things that really drive results.

The spider web is perfect in all its imperfections — and it gets the job done!

A small number of factors in spinning the web must be perfect for the spider to be successful and use it to catch her prey. For the rest, the task being done is good enough.

The same is true for you. What 10-20% of your effort will produce 80% or more of your results/impact? What 80% of your effort will simply completing the task to 80% perfection be good enough?

Heal the Leader

Stop Making Perfection the Enemy of Good…