Good Enough on Purpose

For high-achieving tech parents: why perfectionism backfires at home and work, and a simple tally habit to break the cycle.

I saw the email from my son's English teacher and my heart started thumping.  This is not typically a good sign. “Parent Conference” was the subject. 

It was not what we expected.  She was requesting permission to give my son a slightly unorthodox assignment. She wanted him to do B-minus work on one assignment.   The reason was that she saw he worked so hard to get everything perfect and she was worried about his mental health.   She knew that a low stakes lower grade on purpose to show him that nothing bad happened would be valuable.

We totally agreed.   On top of that we were grateful for this teacher thinking not just about his English capabilities but also his overall well-being.

His response was “I can't do that!”

That made it clear it was the right one.

If you read that and thought ‘same,’ you get it. Most tech parents I work with never got a B-minus assignment. We got promoted for being the one who never dropped a ball.

We are lucky that our son is getting this whole person perspective early in life, because lord knows I did not.  My wife and I are very different people in a lot of ways, but seeing perfectionism in our kids is probably the least surprising trait we could observe.  They got it in droves from us.

School was about getting the best grades and that carried over to work.

Then parenting comes along.  The drive for perfection is an absolute nightmare here.  My identity in particular was so based on excellence and perfection that I struggled when things went wrong.  

Well four kids later, that drive for perfection has been worn down to a nub.  And I am so grateful for it.  There are certainly things in my life where I strive to make it the best I can.  But “good enough on purpose” is the order of the day.  We are long past the ability to eke out that last 5%.  

It was impossible to think about letting “good enough” be at work, but I did and it was a huge relief.  When I was a manager, I learned to pick and choose the moments where I stepped in and where I saw my employees doing “good enough” and leave it at that.  Quite often I was surprised to see that their way of doing it worked out better than mine.

When I started my coaching business, this perfectionism reared its head again.  It kept me stuck on approaches and paths that were leading nowhere like continually remaking a website for weeks that nobody was going to look at because I didn’t know how to do B-minus work.  

Now, my business, my coaching, and my parenting are all experiments that I measure. This helps to move from the shame that perfectionism breeds (I am bad) to the guilt that encourages reflection and improvement (I did something that didn’t work out). 

One technique to help with that: if there is a habit you are trying to break, say looking at your phone around your kids, then keep a tally when you do (but don’t count along).  Try a new habit, like putting the phone in the other room, tick mark when you slip up, and then compare.  Only count when the experiment is over.  Removing the stigma of the failure moment is the first step to making progress.

Last Tuesday I ran a small group of parents discussing exactly this, and halfway through they were coaching each other.

For my son, he ended up not handing in the last assignment of the year.  And the world kept turning.

Alex Egeler is a former aerospace executive and certified EQ coach who helps tech parents find work that fits their family.