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"Go for the gold. Achieve. Stand out. It's the American way to aim for perfection and excel in business, school, sports, and life. We're all trying to do more in less time and feeling overwhelmed as a result. But too many people in business are ineffecient, self-sabotaging perfectionists. If you spend three hours editing an annual report to get it 90% perfect, and then spend another two hours to get it 93% perfect, and another hour for 95% perfect, the incremental improvement is negligible. Think of the time and effort you can conserve and redistribute to other tasks. Unlike other negative advice given, to give up your perfectionism, The Perfectionist's Handbook challenges this mindset which makes it unique. Jeff Szymanski tells readers they got the right idea, but you're taking the wrong paths to achieve the outcome you want.The Perfectionist's Handbook teaches the art of being an Adaptive Perfectionist, someone who stands out and gets bigger playoffs: greater productivity with less effort, more energy, and balance in your work and life. Jeff's strategies to function more effectively and better reach your goals include: Analyze Your Effort Focus on Your Top 10 List Lose the Parachute Embrace Failure Shift and Delegate Secretly Observe Others Refuel and Refresh Invite Criticism "--
Reviews with the most likes.
Not my thing. Perhaps biased by the ironically perfect delivery of the audio book format, perhaps I've bought in to the sense that perfection is all bad.. I'm cynical that teaching perfectionists how to do perfectionism more perfectly is helpful. Healthy perfectionism I can call ambition or achievement-minded, so justifying that some of perfection is ok feels like a level of denial or something I'm skeptical of.
A lot of this referenced the PDF, which...as a library read, I haven't yet seen. Maybe they are useful. Some of the exercises sound like things I've done with clients.. Values oriented is always a good thing, not specific to perfection.
Overall I think any helpfulness was obscured by the proposal of healthy perfectionism and it ended up feeling too fuzzy on how to really address the narratives that play into perfectionism. I'd love to have heard more about getting out of decision paralysis. He touched on this at the end regarding fun, and I definitely want to seek out those pdfs, as I see it a lot... Perhaps could have been discussed more.