I have the pleasure of serving on the University of Oregon Alumni Association Board of Directors which took me last week to Oregon for a meeting. There, I got to chat with students about finding work-life balance and what life is like in the corporate/tech space. These students filled me with optimism about how intentional they will be with how they work.

As part of the meeting we heard from the Director of Behavioral Health for the Oregon Athletic Department. He has a regular caseload of student-athletes he meets with to talk through what’s on their mind. The session was fascinating but one area stood out to me.

As you might imagine, there’s an intense amount of pressure on these student-athletes expected to perform at elite levels. This pressure creates perfectionists.

As you likely know, the more perfect you try to be, the more tense you become, and the worse your performance is.

Plus, perfect is an impossible standard to meet. Somebody will always be of the opinion you did not meet the mark. Not to mention in athletics, tenths of a second might be the difference between winning and third place.

These athletes are counseled to strive for excellence, not perfection.

I think it’s a great lesson for all of us – especially if you’re a perfectionist.

Excellence means you’ve done the best you can. You prepared, you trained, you studied, you came ready to perform. You likely performed admirably but maybe you stumbled over your words in a presentation and thought you lost the business or failed the pitch.

This just happened to me.

I had to give a presentation during my recent interview process and completely lost the way with my words and even threw my hands up for a second. I was convinced I blew it despite getting back on track and giving a great presentation. I got the job and will likely be the only one who remembers those four seconds that felt like four-hundred.

I’m sweating thinking about this again 😰

Perfectionism also makes you work longer than probably needed. All the tweaks and tinkering reach a point of diminishing return. Excellence is a more sustainable mindset – as is understanding the occasion.

There’s a difference between presenting to a client to win a deal with a slide deck and talk track that’s likely been highly vetted, planned out with your team, and practiced for weeks.

Then there’s a presentation I gave this week. It was the first strategy deck I put in front of my new boss. I could have worked weeks on preparing it and likely would have over-engineered it. It also wasn’t right for the occasion. I’m starting a new function, so instead I put the bones of the strategy on slides that could help us get directionally aligned. That way I didn’t throw away a bunch of work if I wasn’t going in the right direction. Now that we’re aligned, I can make it ready to present to wider and more senior stakeholders.

This presentation was far from perfect, but it was perfectly excellent for the occasion.
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