Donald Driver wins 'Dancing with the Stars.' Five lessons you can learn.

Donald Driver was crowned "Dancing with the Stars" champion Tuesday night. Over the 14 seasons of "Dancing with the Stars," many contestants have talked about the life-transforming benefits of ballroom dancing, including weight loss, increased self-confidence, a sense of pride in accomplishing something they’ve never done before, and, importantly, joy. Here are five business lessons the ballroom world has to offer everyone.

2. Perfection is overrated – and inhibiting

Adam Taylor/ABC/AP
In this image released by ABC, Katherine Jenkins and her partner Mark Ballas perform Monday on the celebrity dance competition series "Dancing with the Stars" in Los Angeles. Ms. Jenkins was runner-up in the competition.

At one ballroom dance competition, I made so many mistakes in my mambo (at the time my most terrifying dance) that I despaired of making the “finals,” which included only the top six couples. I whined to my teacher that I knew I wouldn’t “place” (i.e., first, second or third in the finals) because of my mistakes. Well, lo and behold, I won first place. You’d think I would have been ecstatic. I wasn’t. I was bewildered that the judges awarded me a first place when I knew I didn’t deserve it. My teacher laughed when I told him I wanted to return my award. He explained that I won because I danced full out, communicated an understanding of the character of the dance, and showed that I was enjoying myself, not because I didn’t make any mistakes. That was a big revelation to me, and it has changed my approach in business.

Now, when I’m at work, I try to focus on executing a task full out and fearlessly rather than worrying about doing it perfectly, which would just make everyone around me afraid of making a mistake and, therefore, unwilling to risk trying innovative new ways to promote and market our clients. The process of producing breakthrough public relations and marketing is often messy because you’re not following a tried and true path; you’re pioneering a new one.

Requiring that the process of innovation be error-free crimps creativity and risk-taking. This, more than making mistakes, is what inhibits growth and innovation.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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