Perfectionism (Scaling Blocker)
You redo their work. Or you never hand it off because it won't be perfect. Perfectionism (as a scaling blocker) is the belief that everything must be perfect before delegating or scaling. It kills scalability. "Good enough" done by a team beats perfect done by you alone—because you can't scale perfect. You can scale good enough with a quality gate. The shift is from "only I can do it right" to "I define right, and I hold the bar at the gate."
Same output, different standard. Without the shift: you're in every draft, every detail. You're the bottleneck. With the shift: you've defined what "good" looks like (SOP, service standardization). Someone else does the first pass; you do the review. The first time won't be perfect—you'll correct and refine. After a few cycles, quality stabilizes and you're free to focus on what only you can do. Perfectionism often pairs with delegation anxiety. Naming both is the first step.
Good enough done by a team beats perfect done by you alone. Define the bar; hold it at the gate.
How to loosen its grip
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Separate "definition of good" from "doing it yourself." You can own the standard without executing every step. Write down what good looks like; add a quality gate. Let someone else run the process; you run the gate.
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Ship one "good enough" delegation. Pick one task. Delegate it. Let the first version be B+ instead of A. Correct it. See that the world doesn't end. Repeat. Perfectionism loses when you have evidence that good enough works.
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Focus on leverage. Your time is the scarcest resource. Spending 2 hours redoing something someone else could do at 80% is a choice. The 2 hours could go to strategy or the next bottleneck. Constraint theory: find the constraint, fix it. Perfectionism is often a constraint you can name and relax.