Perfect is not always the best option.
I sat on the cold concrete, and focused intently on the boot in my hand. Thick aromatic polish had been slathered on, and now I rapidly swept the surface back and forth with my horsehair brush. I squinted under the halogen lights to see if my reflection appeared in the toebox of the boot. We did this every night for hours until a mirror perfect shine emerged. This was One Station Unit Training(OSUT), the hardcore infantry version of Army basic training.
Our attention to detail on every task was astronomical. We spent countless hours getting our uniforms perfect, and learning how to hold a salute at the exact right angle. We learned to march in step, so that our platoon seemed to be one giant clockwork mechanism of death instead of 30 odd guys from around the country. And of course, we were reinforced with the standard carrot and stick: fuck anything up? Get lots of pain through push ups and other stupid human tricks. Excel and do the best? You get left alone for a while.
Aside from the standard military spit and polish games, we did learn some practical skills that would get us ready for our actual jobs as Infantrymen. You know, like shooting, fighting, blowing shit up. Though I joined up right after 9/11, the Army is a giant bureaucracy and therefore not the most efficient organization. By the time they finally got around to sending me to OSUT, we’d been at war for over a year, and had been massing troops to invade Iraq for some time. The nice thing about joining the military at a time of war is your martial training has a direct purpose. You know there’s a decent chance you’ll need those skills, and your life may even depend on them. I took the learning how to kill before being killed stuff seriously. I didn’t want to die.
But a thought nagged me as I sat there shining my boots. Why the fuck were we spending so much time marching on parade grounds, pressing uniforms to have sharp creases, and, you know-shining fucking boots? Couldn’t we just learn to do a passable job at that BS, then focus more on the stuff that would actually keep us alive?
I’d heard and understood the general philosophy that justified this training approach. We were apparently learning discipline by spending so much time brushing boots and cleaning toilets to a high shine. I later heard a statement that summed up this ethos; How you do anything is how you do everything!! Which was then usually followed by an obligatory Hooah!!! and maybe an America, Fuck Yeah!!! All that.🙄 But still…couldn’t we learn the same discipline by instead spending those hours dry firing our rifles, or practicing hand to hand combat? It took coordination and discipline to march perfectly in unison on the parade ground, but it also took discipline for a squad of soldiers to move in a combat ready triangular formation through the woods. The later actually has tactical application, yet even after we demonstrated proficiency in parade marching, we still drilled it twice as much as the combat formations. This bugged me. Even back then I knew the answer to the disparity; inertia of a large organization doesn’t always trend towards efficiency.
But that’s not what this post is about.
Back to the mantra How you do anything is how you do everything!! The first time I saw this written was in the Orphan X novels.
If you haven’t read them, they’re pretty good thrillers that revolve around the hero, a former assassin, who uses his skills for good. He was part of some insane fictional training program where the government adopted orphans and built them into killing machines. The hero’s trainer had instilled into him the ideal of doing every little thing perfect because of the above mentioned mantra (which I think came from Oprah’s life coach, basically the same thing as a fictional splinter cell level death dealer), which is the foundation upon which he became a total badass. While the books are well written, and the character development is interesting, this last part is total fiction. If you try to do every little thing perfect…. man, you are going to waste a lot of time doing stupid shit that doesn’t matter. I didn’t come up with this. I got it from yet another book about trained killers, but from the non-fiction side of literary fuckery.
Col. Beckwith’s non-fiction memoir Delta Force pretty much ruined all the stupid army games for me when I read it early in my military career. If you didn’t know, Delta (or whatever they’re called these days) is probably the best CQB unit on the planet, among other things. The book chronicles Col. Beckwith’s career, and how he came to start the famed unit. He got much of the inspiration for Delta while on an exchange program with the UK’s SAS, the OG’s of the special ops world. At first he was taken back by the SAS troopers lack of boot cleaning habits and how their uniforms seemed to be in disrepair. Then he did actual training with them, and he was super impressed with their real-world proficiency as soldiers and fighters. He realized that:
1. Though these SAS dudes looked all grody, they maintained the shit out of their equipment and weapons(the shit that their lives depending on).
2. They were such badasses because they spent all of their time training on the skills needed in the real world, and zero on parade ground bullshit.
You see, Beckwith came from the US Army’s Special Forces(SF), which at the time was a relatively new concept in the Americas. Back then SF leaned towards the how you do anything is how you do everything bullshit, and while they were badass, they also spent a crap load of time doing fancy nonsense that had no combat applicability like, you guessed it, shining the fuck out of their boots. Beckwith had been brought up on this philosophy, and totally bought into it. But when he saw the Brits performing on the next level of hardcore, he saw the light. When he started Delta Force, he brought this philosophy with him, and eventually it trickled down to most of the other Special Ops Forces.
I was never in Delta, nor any full on Special Ops Force, if anything my unit was like the JV version. But we were fortunate that a fair amount of our leadership came from other elite units, and we also got some training from some of the best. Beckwith’s take on spit-shine parade bullshit had therefore made it to our unit long before I got there. Thank God, because aside from the occasional fancy dinner function or funeral, I never shined my boots after OSUT. This was a big reason I tried out for the unit in the first place; more time training to stay alive, less time doing bullshit. So I was lucky to serve in such an environment.
I had this counter-perfection ethos explained to me early on by one of the senior guys. He described how it was cognitively easier to try to do everything perfect, and it’s a good method for training base level soldiers that just barely made it through the super low entrance requirements to join, or primarily joined up for the college money and don’t care too much about being soldiers. If you force the perfection ethos on them and keep them to it, there’s less of chance for shit to go sideways.
Sure, they’ll waste a lot of time making some near-meaningless shit perfect, but they’ll never have to actually think and decide what is important or not. When you’ve got people that can barely differentiate between left and right, and/or don’t care to be there in the first place, and you’re trusting them with live weapons and explosives, its simpler to have their attention to detail maxed out on everything. Better than trying to have them differentiate what’s important and what’s not.
Plus there’s dealing with fatigue. Sure, an average person could probably figure out that as a soldier, they should pay more attention to the care of their rifle than the shine of their boots. But then a problem arises; when a normal person is put in extreme situations, like a hot dessert with little sleep and food, after a few days their self discipline will fade and what they previously determined to be important will seem insignificant. Now all they care about is getting sleep and food-they stopped caring about cleaning their rifle, even though it’s getting sprayed with sand. Then when the action picks up without warning, their rifle doesn’t work and everyone fucking dies. Happy story! 🙂
So in the military it’s just easier to train people to have hardcore discipline about everything, and try to do everything perfect. You’ll get soldiers that are good at their jobs, good at a bunch of needless stuff, but will have the widely applied discipline to not completely suck when shit becomes miserable.
But what happens if you need some soldiers to perform some ridiculously difficult, specialized tasks? They’re going to need to spend all of their time working on those tasks, and stop wasting time trying to be awesome at pointless crap. They’ll have to shuck this everything must be perfect bullshit. If you’re going to allow soldiers to apply the counter-perfection ethos, you have to make sure of two things:
- They’re smart enough to determine what tasks their lives depend on, and what they can just phone in.
- They need to have the self-discipline to apply this even when in the worst conditions.
These reasons are why any unit that adopts the counter-perfection ethos spends a fair amount of resources selecting people that meet the above criteria. Probably why soon after I made it through the initial try out for my unit, which involved a bunch of physical, mental, and physiological hurdles, I was kept up for a few nights, PT’d till I puked, then dropped in the middle of the woods at night with no GPS and told to find half a dozen small sticks painted green miles apart. I was told to write down the specific code printed on each stick, and bring my sheet to the end point before time was up. Fuck that up, and I could go back to a regular unit and shine my boots. So, you know, something like that seems to work to figure out who meets the above criteria.
But if you’re reading this blog, you probably either don’t give a shit about getting into some elite unit, or you’ve already made it into one. So how the fuck does all this apply to life outside flash bangs and fastroping? Look, if you found your way to this blog, it also means a few things:
- You ain’t cool with following the average path of sleepwalking through life and just doing what everyone else is doing. If you ended up here, it means you were trying to be better at finaces, or just life overall.
- You figured out how to use a computer and get to this page. So you have some intelligence and you’re literate. From a historical perspective, you’ve got a hell of lot going for you.
- You’ve had the patience and discipline to get through nearly 2000 words of me blathering on, hoping I’d get to a point.
You may not be trying out for the Navy SEALs or FBI HRT, so you don’t really need some crazy harcore level of dedication and self-discipline. But you probably want to do better at some shit at life. You can follow the alluring path that others espouse and do every little thing perfect and hope this will somehow lead to success in your desired pursuits. But you meet the above three criteria, and I think that qualifies you to take another approach. Yes, it requires some thinking and some discipline to work, but I believe you fucking got this. So do this instead:
- Think about what is actually important. If you fuck it up, will you or someone else die or get injured? If you don’t give 100%, will you lose something valuable. Think hard about this part. The dying part is an easy result to define. If you don’t pay complete attention to your driving while making a left hand turn at a busy intersection in the rain at night, you and others have a high probability of ending up as a steel and human hamburger. The valuable part is more difficult. For example, if you have to give a presentation at work, think about how much it matters and wargame some possible second and third order effects. Maybe you’re in a situation where if that presentation isn’t completely perfect, you’ll be fired, you won’t be able to pay your bills, and your family will be on the street. Ok, now you’ve determined that this presentation is pretty fucking valuable. For shit like this, give it a 100%. Concentrate your energy on these tasks. Check, double check, recheck. Be the fucking rainman on this shit. Definately, yeah.
- If no one is going to die, get hurt, or isn’t super valuable, fucking 80/20 that shit. By now you’ve likely heard of the Pareto principle, where 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. This is probably one of my favorite articles describing it’s applicability towards a good life and attaining financial independence. If you’re not going to get fired over that presentation, give 20% effort to achieve a pretty good result, and focus the rest of your effort on shit that actually matters. Just to beat it to death, lets look at boot care. Them old school leather boots we wore in the army actually lasted longer and got a marginal waterproofing effect if you occasionally cleaned them and applied a rough coat of shoe polish. Doing so takes about 20% of the effort of brushing the fuck out of them to the point where they get a mirror level shine.
- If it really doesn’t matter, either don’t do it or phone that shit in.
The above is a pretty sweet chart that I put together in like 5 seconds. Note how it’s not a line graph-there is not a spectrum of effort. You either give something 100%, you give it about 20%, or you keep on trucking and wave at the task while giving zero fucks. The chart itself is an example of this. I could have spent a lot more time on it, but no one was going to get decapitated if it wasn’t perfect, so you’re looking at me phoning it in. Maybe if I was trying to monetize this blog, I would have put 20% effort into it. If I was trying to monetize this blog AND I actually needed the money to feed my kids, I’d have poured my all into it. Luckily that isn’t the case, so you got the point while also being let down by my graphical arts skills. There are so many levels to this half-assed chart. 😆
Keep in mind you’ll have to think about a lot of stuff instead of blindly giving it your all to everything. Yes, the thinking will take more time, but will be more than made up for when you don’t waste even more time excelling at crap that barely matters. After a while you’ll build up this decision making capability, and you’ll need to spend less mental energy making such decisions.
There it is. It took a while, but we finally got to the applicable point. If you want to get the most of your life and do shit you want, don’t fret the small shit and crush the few things that actually matter. I could probably go on for much longer, and hit you with more anecdotes and charts, but noone is going to die if I end this post here.
What do you think of this framework? Am I all messed up? Do you wake up everyday and make your bed with perfect hospital corners, and now you are magically killing it in all aspects of your life? Or have you come up with something even better than the BS I’ve muddled through above? Let me know below!
