The Psychology of Learning

Josh writes about an essay called "The Psychology of Learning" that he found via a link from Bruce Eckel .

The categorization of people as perfection-oriented or performance-oriented seems accurate based on my experience (although reasoning based on "common sense" is often dangerous). I am definitely a perfection-oriented person when it comes to programming and software development. I like to play with all the latest tools and explore all the features of my development environment. However, unlike the author of the essay, I don't necessarily agree that we should be striving to make everyone perfection-oriented. I think I sometimes waste time by trying to find the absolute best way of accomplishing a task, rather than just getting the task done with my current skill set. Perfection-orientation is good under many circumstances, but you have to understand when you are getting diminishing returns from your perfection-striving.