Catalin Costea

You don’t just want to have a perfect product. Perfectionism is just another excuse to postpone delivering things. You are afraid that what you’ve done won’t be good enough. You are trying to avoid criticism and failure by wanting to please everyone with the perfect product. This is what trying to be a perfectionist actually means; wanting to be liked by everyone.

You are going to lose a lot of time trying to improve something that can’t be improved any more. Even if there is still room for improvement, from a certain point on, the effort is just not worth it. You are just going to lose time and resources for something that will not bring any extra value. You might as well move on and start something new.

Trying to have a great product, a great project or wanting to do great work is all you need. Perfection is just not worth trying to achieve. It’s better to launch a product or finish work earlier, deliver, get feedback and improve from there. This is more efficient, time and cost saving, practical and even if you don’t see it now, safer.

Something is perfect until someone gets bored of it.

I am surprised that people, and especially some trainers and motivational coaches, still use this line. It’s a great way to impress, to show off or to promote a product but that’s it. And many people still defend it as if it were true.

It’s clear that anything may happen. This is what people usually use as an argument when defending this statement. Anything has a probability of happening, I don’t argue with that, but considering how slim that probability is, in some cases you can easily call it impossible.

Things like making a trillion dollars by tomorrow or becoming the president of the US by the end of the week or finding a cure for cancer or HIV in 5 minutes are some of the impossible things I am talking about. If you believe impossible is nothing, then please put your money where you mouth is and prove it. This is what being authentic in what you teach or preach is all about. This is what makes you believable, real, successful, a leader and not just another person throwing around words. But you won’t accomplish them. You can’t.

I dare you to say it again.

P.S. If you refer to living a fulfilling life, loving the work you do, being happy or any other personal subjective goal, then this statement applies and it’s actually the only time I encourage and support it. This kind of things are up to you and how you perceive things. The only actual change is in your mindset, your way of thinking and there, indeed, impossible is nothing.

You can either choose to address the masses or you can commit to quality. You have to choose. Masses don’t afford the high quality and the ones who do don’t want what the masses can have. It’s not profitable to try and do both. What’s in the middle is not profitable enough to stray away from the edges.

Quality will make you constantly want to improve, to do things better, not to compromise. It will be a constant search for perfection, for the best combination of elements using the best materials. You can always do better so you will always have your hands full with increasing your quality.

Quantity will make you want to speed up things, to push the limit and reach out to more and more people. It will be a constant search to increase production, to cut corners and to reduce costs. There is always someone you could sell to if only you had a lower price.

Choose what fits you best, not what you think that people want. There is always a market for both.

For far too long have people been striving for normality. People want to be part of the masses. The masses wanting the same cars, the same houses, the same clothes, the same education for their kids, the same jobs. That is what normality actually means. Doing what everyone else does, fitting a pattern, following the same norms or rules.

People see normality as safety, certainty, security, even success. But actually normality is the opposite. Normality is boring, easy to ignore, dangerous and it will never bring you success.

The world is full of ordinary people doing ordinary things. You can join the masses and be just another pawn or you can stand out from the crowd. If you want to succeed you have to be hard to refuse, be indispensable but most of all be memorable. Don’t try to be like the masses but try to be what the masses would want to be.

Forget normal, be memorable.

There is no creativity without courage. Creativity means to push the limits, to come with something new, to do things differently, to make connections that other people have not thought about before. More then these you need to show that to the world and fight for your ideas.

What you need to know is that things are a lot easier for creative people that it has ever been before. People are getting more and more weird, more opened to new ideas, to innovation, more willing to experiment and try new things. You can show your idea on-line and make it available to billions of people. And, you can do all this with almost no costs.

But what this does is open you to criticism, to the resistance and the status quo. With every people out there that can support your idea there are also people who will reject it. Here you need the courage to show your work. To expose yourself to criticism and accept the possibility that you might fail.

Courage is what drives innovation.

There is no such thing as leaders without vision. The same thing goes for entrepreneurs. You can be a good manager, an accountant or even an artist without vision but that’s it. People might admire you or your work, appreciate and respect you but they won’t follow you because there is nothing to follow without a vision.

Steven Jobs was one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all times and much of his success was due to his vision. He managed to see where technology was heading to when most people were still concerned with understanding it. The same goes for Martin Luther King Jr. and his vision of civil rights. He valued so highly his ideas of ending racial discrimination that it became his life purpose.

People will follow visions of greatness, wealth, happiness, peace, fairness, freedom. They will put all their effort into your idea but they need to see the same from you. You must set an example through your vision. That’s what will help you lead. Everything else will follow from here.

You can’t lead if you don’t know where you are going to.

You are going to fail. This is one thing you need to know from the start. The only problem is that you don’t know when it’s going to happen. Even if this might sound as a paradox, you must acknowledge that failure will happen, but never consider it as a possibility.

You have to treat everything as failure is not an option, but when you do fail you must take advantage of it. Most of the times, failure is a better lesson than success. The secret is to learn from it as much as you can when it eventually comes, and then keep on going.

It’s your duty to do whatever is within your powers to succeed. Never start something believing that it will fail because, if you do, it will certainly fail. That would just be a waste of your time and resources.

Do your best and when you fail learn from it and move on.

I am certain you have dreams. We all do. You might dream of fame and money, of changing the world, of making some cool new product, of inventing something or being the first man on Mars.

Never listen to what others say about your dream. They might consider it crazy, stupid, too big, too small, unreachable or even unimportant. As long as it’s your dream it means it’s the most important thing to you and that’s all that matters. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

But as always there is a catch. Dreams without a plan are just dreams. Plans without commitment are just words on paper. Without committing to your dream they mean nothing, even to you.

It’s all up to you to turn your dreams into reality, everyone else is to busy with their own dreams.

The fear of change comes so natural to us, and it’s no wonder since it is well embedded in our DNA. This fear followed us during our evolution for thousands of years. Changes, especially rapid ones, mean a greater risk of going extinct. Survival of the fittest is not about being fit but being adaptable to change.

From an evolutionary point of view, changes are the corner stones of our very existence. Without them we would still be single-cell organisms. Change is what transforms us, what shapes us and makes us become better, faster, stronger and smarter if we embrace it.

As everything else, change has both advantages and disadvantages. You can either live in fear and see every change as another obstacle that you need to overcome in order to survive, or you can see it as a chance to evolve and transform yourself into something better.

You can choose to fear change or to embrace it.

Plans are good. Plans help dreams become reality. For everything we want to achieve we are going to make a plan. Even people who say that they are going to improvise and that they don’t need a plan still have a plan. Counting on improvisation is a plan.

What happens when we get used to making plans is that we start making B plans. Soon we’ll end up with a lot more plans. We might even end up out of letters. Most people do this because they have been told that it’s always good to have a plan B, others because they are afraid that their plan A won’t work, others because they like to try different things.

No matter why you make your plan B it’s clear that you do it because you have other options. This means you allow yourself to think that you can fail. If you fail you still have a way out. So failing is not that important to you anymore. You don’t put everything on only one hand anymore.

Most people that do succeed don’t have a plan B. That’s what makes them push so badly, work so hard and make it eventually. They have no other option but to succeed. For them failure is not an option.

Don’t give yourself the option to fail.