Why Completion Is Often More Important Than Quality

When I was in Japan, a bus driver yelled at me and a friend. We were asking him about directions for about 20 seconds, and we got enough information to realize we weren’t on the right bus. We got off.

My friend is Japanese, and I’m not. He explained the bus driver was getting mad at us because we were holding him up, and because punctuality is incredibly important in Japanese culture. If he waited any longer, he would have been late for his next bus stop.

I have never seen culture as obsessed with punctuality as Japanese culture. I spent a summer working in an organic chemistry lab, and everyone had to be in the lab by 9:30. I would often see people who worked until 2 a.m. the night prior come sprinting from the elevator at 9:28 to avoid being late, whereas in America, few people care if you’re two or three minutes late in the majority of workplaces (whereas 10–15 minutes is a problem).

There were strict punishments for anyone who was late. It’s not like anyone got a spanking or anything because they were all grown adults, but one time, one of the senior Ph.D. students in the lab overslept and was an hour late (after working until 2 a.m. the night before). He had to sweep the entire lab to make up for it.

It was a rigid culture I wouldn’t want to live in, but the Japanese prioritization of punctuality taught me a few things about work culture and success in America, as well as everywhere.

A lot of the time, being on time is more important than being good. Being done is often more important than submitting quality work. I am not saying this to glamorize productivity, but for other reasons.

Here’s why.

In the real world, being late has consequences

You learn this early on in school, and I think this is one thing my education prepared me well for. Any time I was late, my teachers would deduct points from my grade. I had some super strict teachers who would automatically give a zero for any late assignments.

So even if it was not my best work before the deadline, I submitted it anyway. I submitted work that wasn’t my best (if I didn’t have an extension) because being late was much worse than being imperfect.

As a teacher now, I understand why: if you don’t assign any penalty to kids who submit something late, you’re doing a disservice to kids who are doing what they’re supposed to do and are on time.

However, as a special ed teacher, being late on a report or on writing the individualized education plan (IEP) of a student is the worst thing you can do. Being late on a progress report is also pretty bad. It’s breaking the law — parents and students are required to have certain documents at a certain time as mandated by federal law. I’m going to law school, and there are even more consequences for getting something in late in the legal world.

Of course, not every arena of life is as strict. If you’re going to a party, being on time is actually considered impolite in many spaces, and you don’t want to awkwardly be the first person there!

In my graduate program, I ended my first semester with a 3.16 GPA. I regularly missed deadlines and got penalized for tardiness as I struggled to manage my job and my graduate program.

The next four semesters, I somehow earned straight A’s and just graduated with my Master’s Degree with a 3.86 GPA, which is pretty solid considering where I started.

My biggest adjustment? I got my assignments in on time. Even if I thought my work was absolutely terrible, I got almost all my assignments in on time I’m not saying this is a surefire way to earn straight A’s, but the adjustment taught me something.

If you’re the kind of person who worries about quality, there’s a good chance you’re obsessed with perfection

I learned a lot about myself prioritizing getting my work over with and done over having it be “quality.” A lot of the time, I don’t start things and take risks because I’m scared.

I’m scared I’m going to mess up. I’m scared I’m going to embarrass myself. I’m scared it’s not going to work out.

A lot of the time, I don’t say this, but I’m scared it’s not going to be perfect. And even if nothing is perfect, I’m scared of putting myself out there is going to make me feel not good enough — in the eyes of others as well as myself.

Most of the time, if you’re the type of person who worries about being good enough, you might worry about perfection way too much.

A good exercise in getting over perfectionism is being okay with subpar (in your opinion) work. If you’re a writer and you struggle to get anything going, be comfortable writing crap. If you’re a beginner cook in the kitchen just trying to get started, get comfortable cooking dishes that taste like shit.

Perfection is the enemy of growth. And everyone has to start somewhere! There’s always a learning curve for anything you want to get good at, but here’s another point I learned a bit too late in life.

Maybe what you thought was terrible is as bad as you think it is. Maybe it’s not and it was all in your head. Either way, you wouldn’t know if you don’t try.

Sometimes you don’t need it to be good. You just need it to be over.

I would start my Master’s assignments at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, two hours before the deadline, just after napping for three hours because I didn’t have the bandwidth to do the work before the deadline.

Besides just wanting to get the work done before the deadline, I wanted it to be over. I didn’t want to work on an assignment I didn’t perceive as helpful or useful a second longer than I needed to.

My Master’s degree was ultimately a low priority part of my life in the grand scheme of being a special ed teacher, fiancé, runner, writer, and more.

You probably have a lot of low-value obligations you just need to be over, too. However, they’re things that just need to get done — doing the dishes, laundry, mowing the lawn, and taking out the trash are a couple that comes to mind.

A lot of these obligations are obligations where no one cares about the quality of your work. No one cares about how well you took out the trash — they only care if it’s done.

Takeaways

There are passion projects and hobbies where you absolutely should worry about quality. I’m not justifying low-quality work at all, but I am saying many times, completion is more important than quality. Far too much of life unfortunately falls into the “checking the boxes” territory.

If you need an extension, it’s important to ask for it and communicate it. And it’s important to be comfortable with just trying and doing subpar work because nothing is ever great on the first try. Few writers would tell you their first draft is always excellent, and few cooks would say they were great when they started.

You check the boxes and complete what you must and have to do so you can turn your attention to what you love, whether that’s your family, friends, faith, hobbies, or more. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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