Some of you may have had an occurrence back in college when you had to submit a 10-page long assignment, but being so much of a perfectionist, you just had to create the best possible even on the rough draft. You spend so many hours of your time on the project, getting everything right, and when you finally go ask for feedback from your teacher before creating the finished paper, your teachers says you got it all wrong – and on a small technicality. You have done the paper correctly, but you have done it on a topic irrelevant to the subject.
Well, you basically effed up. Sadly, this has also happened to me, and I am sure this has happened to many ex college students out there as well. Well, the underlying problem here comes from a point of ego in perfectionism. You don’t want your teacher to see anything unless you already have a finished project. This is the problem.
Next time, consider the 30% rule. According to the rule, you ask for feedback when you are only 30% of the way to completion. The way this helps is that it allows work to be done incrementally according to the feedback received. This also lowers the margin of error, allowing things to be changed iteratively whenever a problem arises.
In a work situation, this will also be very beneficial as when working on a project together, getting your team members really involved by giving feedback allows clarity throughout the whole team. A little input from everyone allows you to see the bigger picture that you are probably looking for.
The problem stems from being scared of being wrong, but what you need to understand is that we ourselves are not mistake-proof. We do tend to make mistakes as well, but the earlier that mistake is rectified, the better. It isn’t about you. In this case it is the ends, not the means that matters.
