All right, Jesse, what do we got next? Next question is from Roger, a senior level consultant in Wisconsin. For midsize projects such as preparing a large proposal for a new client, my tendency is to allow the effort to fill the available time up to the deadline. How do I know when something is good enough to be done?

Yeah, these type of perfectionist issues are common, especially in knowledge work where you have many different things you're being asked to do. It can be psychologically difficult at some point to say this is good enough, let's move on. If you can't get to that point, you end up like Roger is talking about here, feeling every minute, staying up late, letting other things fall on the wayside because you're just not quite comfortable finishing because it could be better.

What about this? What about that? And that can be damaging both psychologically, but also to your career prospects. The one thing I would recommend, Roger, is clearly identifying the subset of things you do in your job that are what I call needle mover activities. These are the things that really make the biggest difference in your career.

These are probably going to be the things that most heavily leverage your hard won skills and or produce the most value for your organization. These are the things if you can do them at a very high level, will give you leverage over everything else. This is what we care about, right?

So if you are a ad copywriter, a madman type situation, it's like how effective are the ad campaigns you're writing? Are they actually generating a lot of business for clients? That's the needle mover activity. If you're the developer at a startup, how crisp and robust is your code? If you can write really sharp code that's very stable and very efficient, man, that's what matters.

That's what allows us our product to work. It saves us all these hours of repair and support. It's the skill that matters. If you're a professor, papers. Are you writing papers that are attracting citations and are being published in top venues? These are needle mover activities. Once you clearly identify what the needle mover activities are, you can be much more comfortable with the psychological toll of saying this is good enough with everything else.

So you're the ad copywriter. This is the thing that really matters. When there's a one-off thing you're asked to do, like, "Hey, can you get together client testimonials for our website?" You're more comfortable saying, "I'll just do a good enough job. I found some testimonials. I made a plan.

I found them. I checked them. I did it on time. It's at a reasonable level of quality. Great. Let me get back to the thing I really care about." You're a professor doing a committee. Let me make sure I'm responsible and reasonable and I show up and do the stuff I say I'm going to do and I don't want to hand in crap, but I'm keeping this pretty contained.

I have an hour for it here, half hour for it here, and I'm happy with just that's good enough. So when you know what really matters, you don't sweat so much about the stuff that doesn't matter so much. Now keep in mind, if you don't take this approach, if you instead fall back on the perfectionist approach, "I just want everything to be beautiful," this can actually be counterproductive for your career.

If people learn, "Oh, you're someone that no matter what I give them is going to do, they're going to obsess about it and it's going to be 2x better than I would do myself. If I tell them to get client testimonials, they're going to find all these different testimonials and go back and get them revised and they're going to find images and it's going to be really great for the website," I'm going to start wanting you to do more and more of these things.

You will become my go-to person for these type of activities. And what you're going to find yourself then is drowning in what in the research literature they called non-promotable activities. So activities that are not directly related to the main thing you do. You're the professor who everyone wants on their committees because you really do such a good job, but now you can't do your research.

And that's what ultimately matters for you keeping your job. You're the ad copywriter that everyone wants to pull onto their internal facing initiatives because they know that stuff will get done. And because of that, you're not producing the award-winning campaigns on which you could build your career. So there's a cost beyond just the psychology of, "Oh, my schedule is full because I can't let things go." There's a cost to your career trajectory if you're too good at too many things.

Put your energy into the needle moving activities, be reasonable, a reasonable, responsible human on everything else. I won't be late. I won't drop the ball and I'll be fine. But I'm not really trying to blow you away with the stuff that doesn't really matter. I think it's actually better for your career growth paradoxically to be worse at some things and better at others.

It's not the case that being as good as possible at all the things you do is actually going to be the fastest route to progression inside your career.