Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

by Matthew Syed

The desire for perfection rests upon two fallacies. The first resides in the miscalculation that you can create the optimal solution sitting in a bedroom or ivory tower and thinking things through rather than getting out into the real world and testing assumptions, thus finding their flaws. It is the problem of valuing top-down over bottom-up. The second fallacy is the fear of failure. Earlier on we looked at situations where people fail and then proceed to either ignore or conceal those failures. Perfectionism is, in many ways, more extreme. You spend so much time designing and strategizing that you don’t get a chance to fail at all, at least until it is too late. It is pre-closed loop behavior. You are so worried about messing up that you never even get on the field of play.