When there is still plenty of time left and no deadline is available to tell us when to finish, there is ample time for perfectionism.

When we started chatting, my nephew reported how happy he was that he had finished his bachelor’s thesis. After our call, he planned to have it printed to hand it in. At the end of our conversation, he mentioned that he wanted to review it one last time.

The importance of the milestone for him added to his desire to make sure that everything looked good and no unseen error would be left in his document.

Given how he had described the work he had done and how he had organized himself to be able to hand in his work early, it led me to suggest letting go of that last check. Everything he had shared allowed us to believe that he had been thorough, and that having yet another check was there to find the detail that would make his work look even more perfect.

The challenge at such a stage is that every last check will show a detail that could be better, a typo that had been missed until now, or wording that can be enhanced. Finding these details seems to confirm that the last check was useful. But actually, it didn’t remove the last typo. It only removed one he saw. He may not have changed the wording for the better, but it may be a change in his thinking that ends up being incoherent. The formatting might be better, but maybe only different.

And what is a bachelor’s thesis about anyway? Is it there to show that one can write and format a document well? Or is there to show that one can understand a topic, develop one’s own thinking, and describe how it works within one’s field of study?

The challenge of the last check is letting go of the ideal and accepting one’s own level of perfection.