Maintain a portfolio of classical perfection and agile imperfection approaches together

---

I’ve had this baggage tag on my backpack for a year now — which I used as an impromptu surface for an important “not to self” that I haven’t had an opportunity to transcribe. But now I must do it because I’m certain to lose my paper tag!

What does it say? Well, there’s two sides being defined here. Let’s see what they are by first using a little digital enhancement:

Perfection	Imperfection
Until it’s ready	It’s never fully ready
Infinite time	Finite time
Infinite money	Finite money
Productivity low and slow	Productivity high and fast
Master continuously learning through failure and applying it to perfecting their work.	New Master knows to learn through from how folks respond to their unfinished work.

I think my key takeaway is that both kinds of masters iterate — except one iterates privately versus publicly. There’s upsides and downsides to the difference with this approach.

Classical Perfection	Agile Imperfection
Highest fidelity and deepest approach can at times completely alter and refigure reality.	Lowest fidelity and iterative approach can at times pander to an “average” set of POVs.
This approach is expensive and high risk.	This approach is inexpensive and low risk.

So what this says to me is that you think of your portfolio of activities as needing to include a percentage of “classical perfection” versus “agile imperfection” — and you wouldn’t want to go all-in with just one direction. —JM