If It Wasn’t an A, I Didn’t Turn It In (And What That Cost Me)

Eighth grade, I developed a grading system for myself that I’ve carried around for forty years. An A is acceptable. A B is bad. A C is crummy. A D, don’t bother coming home. If the work wasn’t A-level, if I couldn’t look at it and say yes, this is acceptable, then it didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t get turned in. It didn’t get shown to anyone. It lived in a folder or got thrown away, and nobody ever knew I’d done it, which meant nobody could tell me it wasn’t good enough. Tenth grade, my Spanish notebook ended up on the roof of the school building because I didn’t turn it in, because I was convinced it wasn’t right, and it cost me points, which cost me my grade, which cost me my standing, and I learned nothing except that my system had been correct. The notebook wasn’t good enough. If it had been, I would have turned it in. Since I didn’t, it obviously wasn’t.

In college and after, I passed several courses by calculating the exact minimum score I needed on the final exam to get the grade I wanted. I could fail every assignment, and then I’d study hard enough for the final to pull the grade up to a C or a B because if my brain just refused to produce at an A-level, at least I could maintain a passing grade. But I never turned in work that wasn’t A-level, so nobody ever actually knew what I was capable of, because what I was capable of when given real feedback was higher than what I could produce in isolation.

The design curriculum I’ve been building is ten months overdue right now. Not because I haven’t worked on it. I’ve worked on it constantly. But every time I get close to finishing, every time I get close to showing it to someone, I notice something that isn’t perfect. There’s a section that could be better. There’s a video that could be clearer. There’s a concept that needs another example. So I rework it. I change it. I fix it. And it stays in my folder because it’s not A-level yet, and I don’t show work that isn’t A-level.

The cost of this is staggering. When I do finally release something, when I finally decide it’s acceptable, people call it groundbreaking. They tell me it changed the way they see design, or teaching, or their own work. And the gap between when I could have given it to them and when I actually did, that gap is years. Multiple students have graduated. Multiple teachers have figured out how to teach what I was already teaching, just badly. Multiple organizations have made do without materials that could have actually helped them. All because I was waiting until it was perfect. And now I’m more than fifty years past that grading system and I’m still doing it.

My brother Gary was a year ahead of me in school, and he was hyperintelligent. He scored 1480 on the SATs on the third day of an acid trip, which is the kind of detail that only matters because he was demonstrably genius-level smart and nobody ever made a big deal about it. He was just Gary. He did Gary things. But I followed him through the same school, took the same classes from the same teachers, and the message was different. Oh, you’re Gary’s little brother. When he got an A, everyone assumed he was brilliant. When I got an A, everyone assumed I was trying hard to keep up. An A for him was meeting expectations. An A for me was proof I’d actually applied myself.

So the perfectionism wasn’t something I invented for myself. It was something I learned from the gap between how other people’s excellence was perceived and how mine was perceived. If I wasn’t excellent enough to be compared to Gary, then I wasn’t turning it in. If I couldn’t be the smartest person in the room, then I could at least be the person who never showed mediocre work. And that’s a hell of a way to live, and it’s cost me professionally, educationally, and creatively. I’ve missed opportunities because the work wasn’t ready. I’ve been passed over because I didn’t apply because the application materials weren’t perfect. I’ve lost income because I was waiting for the right moment to show something that could have sold six months earlier.

The truth is that nobody needs your A-level work all the time. Most people need your seventy-five percent work on time, so they can build something with it, give you feedback, help you make it better. But I learned early that feedback was proof of inadequacy, so I stopped asking for it. I learned that turning in anything less than perfect was admitting you weren’t smart enough, so I stopped turning things in. I learned that an A was the only acceptable outcome, so I learned to work alone, in secret, until nobody was watching anymore, and by then it was too late to take the risk.

If you’re reading this and you recognize yourself in that pattern, here’s what I know now: the gap between your work and perfect is never as big as it feels. The people who could help you improve it are usually waiting for permission to see it. And the years you spend waiting for the right moment, the right version, the right everything, those years are the cost of perfectionism, and it’s too high. Turn it in. Show them. Let them tell you what’s wrong with it. That’s how you actually get better. The curriculum that’s in my folder right now, the one that’s ten months overdue, that’s probably better than what it would be if I released it today. But it’s not better in a way that matters, not in a way that outweighs the cost of making people wait. So I’m learning to let it go. I’m learning to say this is good enough, and this is enough, and sometimes the work that changes things isn’t the perfect work. It’s the real work, the honest work, the work that’s still rough around the edges because it was made for actual people with actual problems instead of for a version of excellence that only exists in your own head.