Most people misunderstand perfection.
They treat it like a virtue — a sign of craftsmanship, pride, or high standards.
But the longer I’ve led teams, the more I’ve learned a very different truth:
Perfection is often the enemy of progress, clarity, and the people who work for you.
Tom West captured it perfectly:
“Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.”
At first, the quote felt wrong to me. Every engineer is wired to think, Of course we should do everything well.
But leadership changes how you see the world. Responsibility changes it even more.
And over the years, I’ve watched perfectionism drain teams, destroy timelines, and burn out some of the most talented people I’ve ever known.
This is what leadership maturity actually looks like:
knowing what matters, what doesn’t, and what isn’t worth sacrificing your life for.
The Shift: When Everything Feels Critical
The biggest leadership failure I see is this:
Leaders assume every task under their umbrella has a measurable, organization-level impact if it isn’t done exceptionally well.
They believe:
- every deliverable is high stakes
- every deadline is immovable
- every detail must be flawless
- every decision has far-reaching consequences
And when leaders think everything is critical, they unintentionally create a culture where nothing is sustainable.
People sprint until they burn out.
Teams grind over details that don’t matter.
Work stretches to fill every available hour.
Excellence becomes indistinguishable from exhaustion.
I’ve seen QA engineers work 100-hour weeks trying to make every test perfect, every edge case handled, every uncertainty eliminated. One burned out so badly he wrote a quitting email to half the executive team — a diatribe born from doing more than anyone asked and believing he had to.
He didn’t.
But no one stopped him either.
What Perfection Really Costs
Perfection comes from fear — fear of being wrong, being blamed, or overlooking something important.
But when you design systems or processes to cover every possible scenario, you don’t create safety.
You create fragility:
- Systems become rigid instead of adaptable
- Designs become too complex to understand
- Future engineers become afraid to touch anything
- Small changes carry enormous risk
I’ve worked in microservice architectures that were “perfect” in theory — elegant diagrams, strict principles, textbook patterns — and after four years, the project still hadn’t shipped.
Perfection becomes a cage.
Leadership, on the other hand, is about discernment.
The Leadership Questions That Actually Matter
As a leader, I learned to rely on a different set of questions:
1. Will I be mad at myself later if I don’t do this now?
Not everything deserves the extra hours.
2. What is the real consequence if I change my mind later?
Correctability matters far more than perfection.
3. If someone else left it in this state for me, would I be annoyed?
Empathy is a design tool.
4. How much time am I forcing someone else to spend if I over-perfect this?
Perfection rarely scales — burden does.
5. Does making this “better” take away time from something more important?
Everything is a trade. Every trade has a cost.
These questions recalibrated the way I think about quality.
Perfection isn’t the goal.
Sustainability is.
The Moment It Finally Clicked
The lesson first became real when I was running a business — not writing code.
We made chocolates. And I had a choice:
Do we make every filling by hand, with techniques only chefs and culinary school graduates would notice?
Or do we buy high-quality ingredients, focus on the big picture, and deliver something customers love?
Customers were happy either way.
Only other chefs would ever know the difference.
That was the moment I truly understood the cost of perfection:
time, energy, sanity, and opportunity.
If you lose those, you lose everything.
What Leaders Owe Their Teams
Good leaders don’t demand perfection.
They create clarity.
They help teams understand:
- what deserves excellence
- what deserves reliability
- and what just needs to get done so people can rest, reset, and tackle the next hard thing
When someone on my team starts over-engineering, I ask one question:
“What’s the reasoning?”
If there’s a clear, thought-out case, great. Move forward.
If the answer is uncertainty — “I think this might happen” — we revisit.
If the answer is emotional — “This is important to me” — I tell them:
“Then do it. But remember: everything is a trade. What will you give up for this?”
Leadership is not about demanding excellence everywhere.
It’s about knowing where excellence matters.
Tom West Was Right
Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.
Some things just need to be done.
Some things need to be understood.
Some things need to be flexible.
Some things need to be correct — not perfect.
Excellence is selective.
Wisdom is knowing the difference.
Real leadership is deciding where to spend your effort, your team’s energy, and your finite hours — and accepting that the cost of perfection is often far higher than the value it delivers.