When is It Time to Start Over? (or the little tweed suit that couldn’t)

Many years ago, I bought an expensive suit on sale at a samples sale (where stores sell the samples they get of clothing lines which are now past season). It was a gorgeous suit made of a blue and bottle green wool tweed. I never would have been able to buy it at full price and I got it on sale for $75.

At that time I believe (and I still kind of do believe) that if you can buy something that’s made from high quality materials, you can somehow fashion it to fit what you need.

In the case of the suit which was huge on me, I thought that with a really good tailor, I could have the suit taken in so it would look great on me.

The skirt was a very simple pencil skirt and it was easy for my tailor to fit it to me. But the jacket was not as simple. Even though it was a relatively simple design, jackets are made from sevearl pieces fitted together and I just couldn’t get it to work. It was always too big in the shoulders and made me look like a little girl playing dress up with her mother’s clothes.

But I hung on the the suit because it was so beautiful. I believed in my heart that if I just found the right tailor, I could get the jacket to fit me properly.

A few years later when I was attending the University of Michigan to get my MBA, I learned about a tailor who was really good, had worked for high end retailers, etc. So I brought my jacket to him. I asked him to make the jacket double breasted and to use different buttons.

The tailor told me that he wasn’t sure he could do it or even that he should do it but I insisted.

So the tailor did what I asked and redid the jacket into a double breasted style with different buttons.

But even with all this money spent and time and effort to make the jacket perfect, it still wasn’t quite right. Times changed and styles changed. I changed. And suddenly my beautiful tweed suit seemed a little dowdy and outdated.

At some point I ended up donating it to a Thrift Store.

After this experience I learned the difficult lesson that sometimes, no matter how good the material, no matter what the potential, it just isn’t worth the investment to fix something up.

Sometimes it makes more sense to simply get something that is perfect or close to perfect. Or to get rid of what isn’t working and replace it with something that does.

I relearned this lesson the other day when I asked a few colleagues to look over a promotion I wrote that just wasn’t getting much response.

My colleagues didn’t spare me or mince words. They said my promotion meandered, didn’t get to the point, and wasn’t compelling.

As I read their feedback I felt almost sick. The prospect of trying to salvage what was good from the promotion and somehow rework it left a hollow place in my chest. My heart just wasn’t in it.

Instead, I decided to start from scratch, write a better, more focused article, and send a second promotion.

I imagine there are some folks who are natural editors and can rework the most muddled writing into something elegant and effective. I am not that type of person!

Maybe one day, I’ll find and hire an editor with this talent. Until this day, I sometimes need to toss stuff out and start over.