Perfectionism vs. Excellence

I just bought myself a copy of "The Entrepreneur's Creed" over at my favourite christian bookstore, Psalm's Joy, at Queensway Shopping Centre. I was just reading the first few pages when I found this cool excerpt. I really felt like I should share this rightaway.

From the book:

In his book Future Edge, Joel Barker tells of the discovery of "warm" ceramic superconductors by a Swiss physicist, Alex Mueller. "Dr. Mueller was assisted by a young physicist, Goerge Bednorz, who hadn't yet established his reputatation. In fact, it was an error by this young man - not setting the oven hot enough - that accidentally provided the first samples of the ceramic compound. Had he been more experienced, he probably wouldn't have made the error." Dr. mueller capitalized on this error, choosing to ignore the "fact" that ceramic material is an insulator, not a conductor, of electricity. His mistaken idea led to a Nobel prize.

There is a big difference between perfectionism and excellence. Perfectionism abhors error. It tries to eradicate it and destroy it. Excellence, on the other hand, embraces error, builds on it, and transforms it. We don't have "mistakes"; we have "adjustment opportunities." We don't criticize, but rather we try to encourage excellence by learning from our failures ...