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values the improvements a little bit less. Increasing your free-throw percentage from 98

to 99 percent may rank you better in the record books, but it won't win any more games

and the last 1 percent takes almost as long to achieve as the first 98 percent did.

Ten percent of the applications to Harvard are from people who got a perfect score on

their SATs. Approximately the same number are from people who were ranked first in

their class. Of course, it's impossible to rank higher than first and impossible to get an

820, and yet more than a thousand in each group are rejected by Harvard every year.

Perfection, apparently, is not sufficient.

Personal interactions don't have asymptotes. Innovative solutions to new problems don't

get old. Seek out achievements where there is no limit.

Showstopper!

Two hours into Guys and Dolls, time stops.

Nathan Detroit walks out in his yellow overcoat, shouts out to Nicely Nicely Johnson,

and then Johnson and the cast start belting: "Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit

down you're rocking the boat!"

Adrenaline flows. The crowd goes wild.

In that moment, art triumphs over everything. The play has been rolling along, and

suddenly the songs, the lights, the dancing--they're all taken up a notch (or ten). The

crowd wakes up, leans forward, and cheers.

Consider the way a pilot walking down the aisle can change the entire afternoon for a

restless kid on a flight. Or the way a doctor taking just an extra minute can change her

relationship with a patient by pausing and caring.

The opposite of being a cog is being able to stop the show, at will. What would it take for

you to stop the show?

The Pursuit of Perfect

How many of your coworkers spend all day in search of perfect?

Or, more accurately, spend all day trying to avoid making a mistake? These are very

different things. Defect-free is what people are often in search of. Meeting spec.

Blameless.

We've been trained since first grade to avoid mistakes. The goal of any test, after all, is to

get 100 percent. No mistakes. Get nothing wrong and you get an A, right?

Read someone's resume, and discover twenty years of extraordinary exploits and one

typo. Which are you going to mention first?

We hire for perfect, we manage for perfect, we measure for perfect, and we reward for

perfect.

So why are we surprised that people spend their precious minutes of self-directed,

focused work time trying to achieve perfect?

The problem is simple: Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet

spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.

Rough Edges and Perfect

Bob Dylan knows a little about becoming indispensable, being an artist, and living on the

edge:

Daltrey, Townshend, McCartney, the Beach Boys, Elton, Billy Joel. They made perfect

records, so they have to play them perfectly . . . exactly the way people remember them.

My records were never perfect. So there is no point in trying to duplicate them. Anyway,

I'm no mainstream artist.

. . . I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no

overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side

show performers--bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope

tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the

deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the

blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I

learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay

within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the roller-coaster.

To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it . . .

The interviewer then reminded Dylan, "But you've sold over a hundred million records."

Dylan's answer gets to the heart of what