Article from Forbes Online Magazine, dated 27th July 2012 written by Hanny Lerner, a contributor
If you’re a perfectionist, you’ll agree that we inadvertently make
life harder for ourselves because of our incessant need to have things
done a certain way. Our way. Sometimes it’s to our benefit, other times
to our detriment. But one thing is for sure: we care more about the
details than the average person. I consider myself a perfectionist in a
lot of ways, particularly in my career.
An Illustration of a Perfectionist
Growing up, I was an extremely competitive and scholastic student. I
remember being in 1st grade, determined to get the highest grades in the
class. That determination continued all the way through college, and
all my teachers, Rabbis and professors knew how important academic
achievement was to me. In my final semester of my senior year in
college, my professor decided that he needed to teach me a life lesson.
He called me into his office and said that he was giving me an A minus
on my Asian Business exam.
Not because my final paper didn’t deserve an A, but because he cared
about me and wanted me to learn that there is no such thing as “Perfect”
– that I shouldn’t think I am less smart, less capable or less
successful because I didn’t graduate with a 4.0. He indeed gave me an
A-, and I graduated with a 3.98 GPA. As crazy as it sounds, I was absolutely devastated and it took me several months (and two CUNY appeals) to get over it.
We Can’t Do It All
My perfectionist nature played a big role when I co-founded my business. In the first few months of building MOD Restoration,
I needed to do everything myself. God forbid I let someone else handle
the bookkeeping, the customer service, the sales, the marketing, the web
or graphic design. After all, who else would do it as well as I would?
But I quickly realized the growth inhibitions and lack of free time that
came along with doing everything (but the actual furniture restoration)
myself. We worked till midnight every day and had zero social life. So,
with the help of my business mentor, I slowly learned to let go. I
hired people to replace me and started getting my social life back. At
26, I was taught Business rule 101:
You simply can’t grow a company doing everything yourself.
Details Still Do Matter
That same year, I decided to invest my money in real estate and
bought a small apartment building in Brooklyn. It was a foreclosure
property, and required a complete gut renovation. My real estate friends
tried to convince me to renovate it so that it was just “good enough,”
and that the details didn’t matter. But boy, did they matter to me. I
needed the doors to be 8′ high instead of the standard 6’8”, the
hardwood floor planks had to be 6” wide instead of 3” wide, the door
hinges to be stainless steel instead of gold, the toilets to be TOTO instead of Kohler,
the tiles had to be 24” wide instead of 12”, the outlet covers had to
match the exposed brick wall….the details were endless. It reached a
point where I wasn’t sure whether I was doing all this for the
prospective tenants, or for my own perpetual need for perfection.
Looking back, I’m sure it was the latter. Today, I have 20 wonderful
individuals living in the building who absolutely love their apartments –
and I doubt they even notice the color of the hinges.
Balancing Perfection
Being a perfectionist is part of who I am as a business owner and I
embrace it. In fact, I love that about myself. As long as we don’t let
it control us, I believe that it enables us to build great companies
that produce high quality results. Of course, I’d like to inspect every
piece of furniture that my company reupholsters to ensure that it’s
perfect, but I know that it’s not feasible (nor healthy). Instead, we
have 3 separate sets of eyeballs that inspect each piece of furniture
before it leaves our upholstery studio. Between them all, we’re bound to
get it perfect – or I should say, almost perfect :)
Source: Forbes Online Magazine
kumaran nadaraja
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