The beauty of the perfect product, system or service. Everything thought out from start to finish. Everything in its place. A true Masterpiece. Does this sound wonderful to you?  Me too!  If you can relate to what I am saying, you also may suffer from the trap of Perfectionism. We’ve all had friends and have seen co-workers that have delayed the completion of a project as they make a “final” (tweak to a document, a website, a design, or something else. How much time was lost completing this “final” task only to discover there are more tasks to be completed?

In a past life, I called this the “Engineer’s Dilemma” as design engineers continually tweaked their drawings in the pursuit of perfection, only to fall further and further behind in their schedule, placing increasing schedule performance pressure on the next team to work the project once the designs had been released.

You don’t need the “perfect” plan to start your own business. You will never foresee all the challenges and opportunities that will come your way prior to starting. Rather you need a framework that will guide you.  Imagine that you are driving at night, in the dark to a destination that you’ve never been before. You’re not familiar with the neighborhood of the final destination, or the roads  that you’ll need to take to get there. But good news. You have a GPS to guide you to your final destination.  The GPS is the framework that you’ll use to get you to where you need to go. However, the visibility of the road that your headlights give you is the detailed actions you’ll need to accomplish to get you to the next step. You only need to concern yourself with what is within your headlights, while you rely on the GPS to be your guiding framework. The same principles apply to setting up and launching your own business.

When I was a student in high school and college, I was the type of student that felt like I was under too much pressure if I didn't have my major assignments done a week, if not two weeks prior to the due date. This was something that I prided myself that I often had my work done prior to the completion date and I could go into that final stage doing some last minute adjustments without the pressure to get the bulk of the work done well. When I entered the workforce, I applied this same approach to my career, often getting ahead in the work, making sure that I didn't have that pressure and feeling like I could do the best job possible with the amount of time that I had.

At one point in time, I worked for a gentleman, his name was Tim Tran, and he was the owner of a law firm. Tim had the exact opposite habit of mine in regards to working ahead. For example, I would get a call that there were some concerns about a particular issue and I would often brainstorm with Tim about solutions to resolve these issues. Some solutions required that Tim, as an attorney, get involved and be proactive, jumping in to help remedy the issue. But when I took these issues to Tim and discuss them, often time what Tim did was give a “ho-hum” answer and push it off and his response was basically, “let's wait until the deadline and see what happens". This was very frustrating for me because I felt why would you waste the time you have that you could use to work to resolve the issue?