Consistency Over Perfection

Should you aim for Perfection? Or is it Consistency that matters more?

‘Moment is more important than momentum’ is an oft-used line to denote how an episode of perfection can often trump regular good performance when it comes to success. However, in business, it isn’t easy to imagine the former without the latter. At the same time, it comes to achieving perfection versus consistency; the time-tested advice is to strive to be consistent.

The reason we recommend this is because perfection at all times will tend to go against the law of averages. Per the law of averages, one will never be able to perform at their peak consistently; there will be moments, days, or events of high performance interspersed with average days (and some days when your performance will be off-peak). However, you could consistently minimize the days when your performance is below par, pushing your average performance up.

However, it isn’t just about reducing the low-performance occurrences that will drive up your average performance. With consistent efforts, you would be acquiring discipline and honing your talent and skills that you need to exercise even more. More importantly, you would also be learning from negative experiences and working towards avoiding repeating them. Thus, as you gradually begin to eliminate the possible causes that can trigger failure in your endeavors, you will slowly increase your general success rate and the days you are at the top of your performance. This is another factor that will contribute to improving your performance average.

There are several scenarios from a business context in this regard, and here, we quote a couple of them:

• If you are a sales professional, you will not have a high conversion rate when you first begin to pitch a new product. However, if you stay unfazed in the face of constant rejections, you might realize the reasons behind your sales pitch to result in conversions. And as you work towards correcting your approach and gaining greater familiarity with your target audience, you will be able to achieve higher sales. Often, there is also a possibility (especially when we talk in a B2B situation) that following up with a prospect after you have been turned down might lead to converting the opportunity into a client.
• If you are working in an operations role such as a plant manager and wish to ensure that your plant has the best operating economics and efficiency from the get-go, achieving it would not be easy. However, a Kaizen approach (Japanese term for continuous improvement), where you go about identifying one process bottleneck at a time and work towards eliminating it and streamlining your processes, will eventually help you achieve lean operations, meaning higher plant profitability and fuel efficiency, better material and resource utilization, and lower wastage. However, this would require you to embrace the approach of consistently looking for ways to improve plant functioning.

Whether consistency can necessarily be said to be the mother of perfection can be up for debate, but if there is one thing that can take you closer to perfection, one step at a time, it has to be consistency. The above two hypotheticals, but still very real, illustrations should be enough to convince you how.

What could, however, come in the way of ensuring consistency is constant distractions or having to perform mundane, pesky chores as part of ‘work requirements.’ If you are a business owner, you will do yourself (and even your team) a favor by outsourcing some of the less productive tasks (be it attending inquiry calls, managing postal mail, or planning schedules for the days ahead). You could ideally look for the services of a virtual receptionist to ensure that you can focus on consistently improving your job performance (or at least maximizing the time you spend towards that end).