Mark Cuban was right — “Perfection is the enemy of success.”

As a business owner you need to make decisions and move forward. You can always alter course, but you can’t stay still while seeking a perfect solution.

Perseverance will always be a better solution than perfection. When you focus on perfection, you lose sight of other opportunities that could be pushing your business toward success. Developing a growth-oriented mindset will open your mind to possible solutions that will help drive your business forward. When things aren’t going right, try not to look at them as failures, but rather as opportunities to address problems by finding better solutions. By understanding failure in a different light, your areas for opportunity aren’t restricted by unattainable standards. Use optimism as a tool when actively progressing your business. Also understand that your time is valuable and should be utilized according to what is necessary to the success of your business.

Growth-oriented mindsets vs. perfection

When you seek perfection, you’re often closing your mind to opportunities and solutions that could push your business in the right direction. With a growth-oriented mindset, you’re more likely to ask yourself, “what can I do here to improve the situation?” This CNBC article explains how neuroscientists have found that a growth mindset is the most effective mindset for achieving goals, gaining new skills, and developing positive changes in your life.

Applying this mindset to your business will open the door to finding more solutions and improvements. When addressing areas where you lack certain skill sets, consider asking yourself, “who can I find to help improve the situation?” Finding the people who compliment your skill set will allow more opportunity for growth and business improvement. Mark Cuban mentioned this strategy as an important stepping stone during New York Advertising Week. See more from his talk here.

Change your definition of failure

Your solutions may not always work the first time, but this is where perseverance will come in handy. Your biggest failure will be giving up completely. See your failures more as opportunities to look at the problem from a different perspective. Mark Cuban says, “you only have to be right once,” so no matter how many tries it takes, you persevere through the mistakes to get to a really great solution.”

This concept comes back around to the optimistic growth-oriented mindset. Seeing your failures as opportunities for growth gives you and your team more room to find simple solutions to problems you may have ignored or overlooked. You’re looking for progress here, not ways that will set your business back.

Your time is valuable

Cuban also stresses how important your time is to accomplishing your goals. With the technology of today, lengthy phone calls and meetings are not necessary to keep a consistent dialogue of priorities. If you do business with a number of partners, the process of getting everyone in one room or on one phone call takes away valuable time that could be spent doing the actual work. Email threads can often be a much more effective way of communicating that also saves time to keep on track working toward the collective goals of the company.

Your time is valuable on and off the clock for productivity and stress levels; both of which arguably are factors that can affect your abilities to be optimistic and find sustainable solutions. In a previous article (Your Daily To Do List), I discussed various ways to improve your to do list to be more productive with priorities and thus save you valuable time and generate a stronger work-life balance. Look at your routines and day-to-day business and see where you can optimize your time to best approach improvements and solutions for your company.

It’s quite obvious that no one is perfect, and neither are their businesses. So why should you hold yourself to an unattainable standard when you can productively push toward company goals? See your “failures” as opportunities and you will be one step closer to a growth-oriented mindset that will continue to encourage progress over perfection. Understand the value of your time and productivity to ensure no time is wasted in reaching all the goals you’ve set for your business.

You can find additional articles from Michael Roub at Inflection 360.

Michael Roub
Inflection 360
Michael Roub is an experienced strategic consultant and Managing Partner of Inflection 360. Michael advises businesses and healthcare practices on a wide range of strategic initiatives.
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Originally published at inflection360.com on September 4, 2018.