I was born with a highly perfectionist personality. As I went through elementary school, I’d struggle at times with needing to just complete things versus making them absolutely perfect. Up until around seventh grade, I would fail to finish tests, but my teachers would recognize that the portions I had done were fully accurate. Over time, I’ve gotten better at completion, through my own efforts as well as those of my parents, teachers, counselors, friends, and other supporters. Yet being comfortable with partial progress is still something I struggle with in certain scenarios.
In 2020, I started talking to a counselor from a program called Beyond BookSmart. I realized and identified that my reluctance to share my partial progress — my reluctance to tell people about something I worked on until it was in its perfectly finished state — was holding me back at work. We came up with some guidelines to deal with this: look at only up to two alternative approaches before deciding to bias for action and choose one, and break up a task into chunks so I don’t feel overwhelmed and procrastinate on the full block. But even with these tactics, I still don’t know if my journey with this is complete, whether I am truly as comfortable today as I want to be with sharing partial progress at work.
Nevertheless, because of these experiences, comfortability with partial progress is a skill that I value highly. I admire people who can do it better than me, and I recognize that it’s a skill that is important for healthy communication at work. I hope to keep working on and practicing this skill to make myself a better communicator and coworker.
Beyond work, the value of this skill is apparent in all kinds of scenarios throughout our lives. At different stages, we will have different responsibilities — work being one of them — and sometimes to fulfill these responsibilities, we will have to be OK with imperfection. So this is an important skill in general as well.
Recently, I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of free time back to myself, which I’ve been really enjoying. With fewer responsibilities now that I have to attend to, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time on my hobbies. Throughout my life, I’ve always loved immersing myself in a wide variety of interests. As a child, I’d constantly be producing something, whether it was writing short stories, designing advertisements for nonexistent products, drawing posters for nonexistent movies, or one of my many other activities. Today, I love learning about math, physics, and other sciences, but I also love working on personal coding projects, writing fiction, dabbling in music, and engaging in many, many other pursuits.
While I’ve always cherished my enjoyment of a broad space of hobbies, at the same time my perfectionism has led me to avoid sharing much of what I do and explore. This rings especially true for my hobbies, where there isn’t really a requirement or need to share. Yet whenever I start a new project, I constantly imagine the future where I’ve finished the project and shared it with everyone, and that excites me immensely. But with a hobby like math, where there is a basically infinite span of knowledge or content out there, where there is no “finish line” or end, once I achieved something, I’d always want to explore more. When I’d proven a theorem, I deemed it to be not enough to write about — I had to generalize and extend it first. But that would continue, forever. And so I’d hold out on myself. I’d delay my own joy at being able to write about something I was really passionate and excited about. The end result: most of the stuff I do as part of my hobbies has been sitting on my laptop for 2, 5, even 10 years, yet it’s only ever been seen by a few people in the entire world.
Recently, I’ve been trying to share more and more of what I do with my hobbies, allowing myself to indulge in my own gratification. For other people who may be similar to me, even when it comes to non-essential activities like hobbies, I’d suggest also trying to fight the perfectionism urge and instead embrace “publish early, publish often.” For example, this website was something I created in 2020 in order to have a place where I could publish my content — my thoughts, ideas, and other writings that were otherwise sitting on my laptop forever.
Having this website has given me a lot of joy in this regard. At the same time, there is still a lot of content I have been working on that is not talked about here or anywhere else. But now, spurred by my amazing girlfriend Kanika, who had pointed out to me early on how much content I was working on that wasn’t seeing the light of day, I’m working on enhancing my website to create a place where I plan to more frequently publish some of my stuff. Specifically, as I already mentioned, one of my biggest hobbies is doing math and science, and a large part of this is what I call explorations: investigating offshoot questions or ideas based on what I’m reading or learning about. For example, when I started learning complex analysis (a subject in math), one of the first topics that comes up is the Cauchy-Riemann equations. I didn’t at first understand some aspects of the equations or the related definition of the complex derivative, but once I figured it out I used my learnings to motivate a follow-up question, of generalizing the equations “algebraically.” (“Algebraically” in quotations because it’s not really purely algebraic, but to me it seems “more” algebraic than some of the other generalizations that are typically written about, for example to multivariable complex analysis.)
So I’m planning an “Explorations” tab on my website, that I intend to mirror all my work in math, physics, computer science, and related fields. I want this to be a main place where I publish more often and without as much delay, whenever I have a new thought or question on a topic. I intend it to be a chronicle of all my ideas on these subjects. Deliberately, a lot of it will be incomplete, perpetually so as I keep working on my investigations and updating their pages bit by bit. Some of this could be stuff that has a known resolution, other parts of it could even hopefully lead to research papers some day! But I want to start writing about and sharing it all. Additionally, I’m also thinking about adding an “Outlines” tab, to track my learning of the high-level picture of a topic, how its different parts relate to each other and fit together. The content in this section will also probably keep changing as I read more.
As I continue to learn and share, I’d love to enhance and evolve my knowledge by reading your words as well, in the discussion on those pages. I’ve even discovered new topics as part of my explorations (for example, my generalized Cauchy-Riemann equations project led to looking at non-Archimedean analysis), and I’d love to keep learning and exploring more this way.
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EDIT (07/25/2023): The category labels on my website have changed since I first wrote and published this post. Nevertheless, the central idea has always remained the same — I’m still always looking to grow by becoming more and more comfortable with discussing partial progress.
Incidentally, I recently found a great post by Terrence Tao on the importance of partial progress, although his post was more in the context of solving multi-step problems (especially math problems) while my post is more in the context of communication (generally for any project, not just a math problem.) Nevertheless, the two posts are generally pretty similar in their themes and ideas, and I enthusiastically agree with his post. It also shows that problem solving is yet another context in which the concept of partial progress is valuable.
