My wife is a perfectionist, she spends unreasonable amounts of time even in little tasks (like making the bed) to make sure it's "perfect". We all talk about perfectionism in the workplace or job-related activities but in reality it's a PITA in every aspect of life.
Unlearning perfectionism
51–60 of 104 posts
Re: Unlearning perfectionism
#52Arun is describing almost every flaw a human being can have and wrapping it all in what he calls perfectionism. A good way to see if the scenarios he paints qualify you can just ask the question, if I did those things differently would I then be less of a perfectionist? I'm not sure the answer is an emphatic yes.
I use the term "perfectionism" to describe the space of behaviors around the traditional description. Like any generalization it can be expanded so much that it includes everything. But what separates perfectionism from normal fallibility, to me, is the degree of identity investment in the outcome. Disappointment per se is not perfectionism. What makes it a tendency worth naming is the intensity of mental stress and self-recrimination that follows.
Re: Unlearning perfectionism
#53I'm a recovering perfectionist who has read their fair share of Brene Brown, Steven Pressfield, Seth Godin, Tony Robbins, Anne Lamott, and many more. The best metaphors I've read is in Bird by Bird. The author describes two different scenarios. The first is that perfection & progress is much like driving late at night with headlights. You will only be able to see as far as your headlights allow. You might be going th…
The most important aspect for me is in setting reasonable, concrete benchmarks that you can self-assess. Although good teaching and mentoring can be helpful, external opinion is also the source of many bad benchmarks - all too often nobody will be there to give advice more specific than "this is good, that is bad".
To get better benchmarks, you have to do some philosophy to set up principles that you can judge yourself with. This can be daunting but is much more effective than trying things at random. Once you have them, though, your self-assessments become much more reasonable and perfectionism will recede: You know what it takes to go from 90% to 99%, and can weigh that against developing in other respects.
Re: Unlearning perfectionism
#54“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When there is nothing more to take away you're left with nothing. As they say, "Nothing is perfect."
Re: Unlearning perfectionism
#55The most apt description I have come across of perfectionism is that it stems from some unresolved trauma that led to a fear of not being accepted and resulting lack of confidence.
Or being required to do something really important, but failing and suffering/seeing bad things happen in part because they or someone they depended on was unprepared (even if knowing how to be prepared, or being prepared was not really realistic in the circumstance). It can come from something as simple as the family losing their income and having serious problems due to economic issues, to a parent dying, or a majo…
> Over preparing/over doing it to the point where most would call it ‘perfectionism’ has saved my ass many times, because it meant when I got put in a situation that turned out to be much harder or scarier than I had imagined or knew was possible, I actually had the bare minimum necessary there to pull it off or get out of the situation successfully.
That bit really resonated with me. Having a fixed mindset in certain cases has allowed me to get away in some extreme challenges where a growth mindset surely would not have.
Re: Unlearning perfectionism
#56Great article. Incidentally, CBT, ERP and mindfulness with self compassion are also the same therapies prescribed for people suffering from various forms of OCD
Re: Unlearning perfectionism
#57The most apt description I have come across of perfectionism is that it stems from some unresolved trauma that led to a fear of not being accepted and resulting lack of confidence.
The unresolved trauma part seems plausible but at least from personal anecdote the corresponding fear may not be of social ostracism in particular but any of a larger family of undesired social consequences (self-image could be considered "social" insofar as it concerns one's relationship with oneself)
Re: Unlearning perfectionism
#58I'm a recovering perfectionist who has read their fair share of Brene Brown, Steven Pressfield, Seth Godin, Tony Robbins, Anne Lamott, and many more. The best metaphors I've read is in Bird by Bird. The author describes two different scenarios. The first is that perfection & progress is much like driving late at night with headlights. You will only be able to see as far as your headlights allow. You might be going th…
The most important aspect for me is in setting reasonable, concrete benchmarks that you can self-assess. Although good teaching and mentoring can be helpful, external opinion is also the source of many bad benchmarks - all too often nobody will be there to give advice more specific than "this is good, that is bad". To get better benchmarks, you have to do some philosophy to set up principles that you can judge yourse…
I like the idea: do you have any examples of it in practice?
Re: Unlearning perfectionism
#59I had a professor once that said he found his most professionally successful students weren’t the ones who got A’s but the B students and he calked it up to the notion that the B students were better able to know where the maximum return on their invested effort was where as the A student invested whatever it took to get the A even if the incremental effort required wasn’t proportional to the incremental benefit of the next hire grade.
The notion that perfectionism can be harmful reminds me of that.
Re: Unlearning perfectionism
#60To share a contrarian view, what I have always observed is that if an organization has an ingrained culture of 80-20, then by the time something percolates 3-4 hand offs, the org half-asses the execution and more often than not fails. Organizations that can execute even somewhat more consistently instead run rings around and completely destroy the 80-20 organization over time and people lose their jobs.
The secret is to figure out from an organization standpoint what is really a "good enough to succeed" end-deliverable or end-execution and organize to deliver that "good enough" thing consistently with perfectionism. Paired with this , there needs to be a process which continuously stretches what it means to be "good enough" over time with productivity and feature enhancement investments.