What do you aspire to be?

When we go looking for a co-worker, a freelancer, a vendor or even a boss, we’re hoping for something. It might be:

Perfect

Interesting

Accommodating

Productive

Challenging

and a host of other attributes that any of us are able to aspire to.

Of course, we never look for someone who is invisible, or brittle, or a bully.

The temptation is to take the lesson of a dozen years of compulsory education and choose to be the perfect one. The problem with perfect, though, is that it’s really difficult to pull off in the long run. The problem with perfect is that when you fail, you have none of the other more flexible human traits to fall back on. And the problem with perfect is that merely meeting spec means that the organization is soon going to be looking for someone cheaper and faster than you are.