the sloppy truth

Check out this excerpt from Peter King's commencement speech to Ohio University.

You know what bosses in the real world hate? Sloppiness. I had a journalism professor here, Dru Evarts, who had a rule in every one of her classes. Any paper you wrote for her would get an automatic F if there was one misspelling or one grammatical error. Experience was a painful teacher there, and some really good writers got Cs and Ds over the years in her class. Her theory was a good one -- there's never an excuse for submitting anything less than your absolute best. Now, with computers able to validate every apostrophe, there's really no excuse for you to send out a cover letter or résumé with even a minor mistake.

A couple of years ago, a young writer asked me to read one of his stories. I counted -- 14 errors. I emailed him back and said, "Don't waste your time trying to do this job until you have enough respect for your readers to spell 'thorough' correctly."

For the entire address click here.

Does this carry over into every aspect of our lives? Should I be striving to be a perfectionist? Does this effect the way other people view me?

courage,
-davey