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Are you a perfectionist? Here’s how to successfully fail at over-achieving – ultimately, defeating excessive perfectionism.
Excessive perfectionism involves setting impossibly high standards for yourself or others; standards that usually force you to fail and too easily discourage you from even trying. It’s a set of self-defeating thought patterns that push you to try to achieve impossibly high goals and render all your work, however excellent, subjectively unsatisfying and sterile.
It’s good to want to succeed, to plan and organise your efforts, but true value lies in working towards realistic and reachable goals while tolerating some imperfections. Better a fully nutritious and tasty meal on time than a magnificent feast that never reaches the table.
8 ways to spot a perfectionist
You may not even know that you’re a perfectionist. Look at the following traits – and you might just have to change your mind:
- You’re extremely competitive and hate failing.
- Other people must be as perfect as you.
- Asking for help is considered a flaw or weakness.
- You work on a task long after other people have given up.
- You obsess about a mistake you made.
- Things must be done just right or not at all.
- You constantly correct other people when they’re wrong.
- You didn’t miss the typo in the title above. (Caught you!)
Is it possible to be perfect?
No! It's a mirage, a goal that no human can achieve. And if you devote yourself to reaching perfection in any particular area, there will never be enough time or energy to spend on other areas of life and work.
So much more effort is needed to try to do a perfect job, rather than a good one. But actual differences in visible results and value are surprisingly small. It's much better to be excellent than perfect, and excellence includes enjoying each task and learning from it.
Constantly striving for perfection can also encourage you to never actually finish a task through fear of failure: "I'm not finished yet, so I haven't failed yet”. It’s a bit like that nice hotel manager in the Best Marigold Hotel who says: “It will all be right in the end. If it's not right, it isn't yet the end."
Your self-esteem is also in peril if you always see yourself as worthless if you’re not producing outstanding results. To always assume you're worthless when a task doesn't work out as well as you wanted it to, even though others are satisfied with your results, leaves you vulnerable to low self-esteem.
Maybe we’re born with it
We may be born with an obsessive personality, and may run into problems that look superficially similar, but an obsessive person wants things done just one way, every time – even if it's not actually the best or most successful way. Their obsessive rituals in fact severely compromise their ability to perform well, or even adequately.
A perfectionist, on the other hand, is created and trained by excessive parental expectations. Parents, who for any reason didn't do as well in life as they'd hoped, may want their kids to be superb. Some foolishly believe in never praising the child: "We don't want him to get a big head!" They ultimately produce a child who feels that however hard they work, nothing they do will ever be good enough.
Preferring to be safe, we become less creative, and thus less perfect, not trusting our natural talents. Life becomes one perpetual examination day, with constant and strict self-evaluation, and everyone you meet a potential external examiner – ready to fail you.
If anyone else is less than delighted, you’ve failed. But even if they're happy, maybe they didn't look closely enough or they just have bad taste. The attitude is like that of Groucho Marx when he joked that: “I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would accept the likes of me as a member.”
Of course, just having high standards isn't wrong, and doesn't cause problems at all. It's a useful attitude, promoting excellent work. It's what you do with the standards that matters. Aim for your best, the best you can manage – the best that's practically achievable by you in the particular circumstances. You don't need to be phenomenal all the time. Just be an ordinary, everyday Superman.
It’s okay to shoot and miss
Aim at perfection, by all means, but don't insist on reaching it. You can use the stars to navigate, but don't actually expect to reach them every time you leave the house.
Learn to challenge your assumptions about how awful it would be to be slightly imperfect. Ask yourself if it would really matter if you didn't leave your spice rack in accurate alphabetical order?
When it comes to parenting, the goals and standards you set will determine how your child develops:
- Never let a child feel love is conditional on being a Superkid.
- Help them set priorities, select tactics, identify resources, and practice realistic self-evaluation.
- Help them to see flops and mistakes as chances to learn how to avoid that outcome next time.
- Praise their efforts and not only the results.
- Never emphasise flawlessness as a trait.
- Teach them to accept their mistakes as a lesson on what to do differently next time.
Where perfectionists apply similarly excessive aims to others, this spoils relationships and overall performance, so don't merely export or project your perfectionism.
Your aim should be to accept that you’ll make new mistakes, and to realise that if you learn as much as possible from each of them, and fine-tune your performance, you need not keep on making the same mistakes each time, and can continue to grow and develop.
- (M. A. Simpson, psychiatrist)
Excessive perfectionism involves setting impossibly high standards for yourself or others; standards that usually force you to fail and too easily discourage you from even trying. It’s a set of self-defeating thought patterns that push you to try to achieve impossibly high goals and render all your work, however excellent, subjectively unsatisfying and sterile.
It’s good to want to succeed, to plan and organise your efforts, but true value lies in working towards realistic and reachable goals while tolerating some imperfections. Better a fully nutritious and tasty meal on time than a magnificent feast that never reaches the table.
8 ways to spot a perfectionist
You may not even know that you’re a perfectionist. Look at the following traits – and you might just have to change your mind:
- You’re extremely competitive and hate failing.
- Other people must be as perfect as you.
- Asking for help is considered a flaw or weakness.
- You work on a task long after other people have given up.
- You obsess about a mistake you made.
- Things must be done just right or not at all.
- You constantly correct other people when they’re wrong.
- You didn’t miss the typo in the title above. (Caught you!)
Is it possible to be perfect?
No! It's a mirage, a goal that no human can achieve. And if you devote yourself to reaching perfection in any particular area, there will never be enough time or energy to spend on other areas of life and work.
So much more effort is needed to try to do a perfect job, rather than a good one. But actual differences in visible results and value are surprisingly small. It's much better to be excellent than perfect, and excellence includes enjoying each task and learning from it.
Constantly striving for perfection can also encourage you to never actually finish a task through fear of failure: "I'm not finished yet, so I haven't failed yet”. It’s a bit like that nice hotel manager in the Best Marigold Hotel who says: “It will all be right in the end. If it's not right, it isn't yet the end."
Your self-esteem is also in peril if you always see yourself as worthless if you’re not producing outstanding results. To always assume you're worthless when a task doesn't work out as well as you wanted it to, even though others are satisfied with your results, leaves you vulnerable to low self-esteem.
Maybe we’re born with it
We may be born with an obsessive personality, and may run into problems that look superficially similar, but an obsessive person wants things done just one way, every time – even if it's not actually the best or most successful way. Their obsessive rituals in fact severely compromise their ability to perform well, or even adequately.
A perfectionist, on the other hand, is created and trained by excessive parental expectations. Parents, who for any reason didn't do as well in life as they'd hoped, may want their kids to be superb. Some foolishly believe in never praising the child: "We don't want him to get a big head!" They ultimately produce a child who feels that however hard they work, nothing they do will ever be good enough.
Preferring to be safe, we become less creative, and thus less perfect, not trusting our natural talents. Life becomes one perpetual examination day, with constant and strict self-evaluation, and everyone you meet a potential external examiner – ready to fail you.
If anyone else is less than delighted, you’ve failed. But even if they're happy, maybe they didn't look closely enough or they just have bad taste. The attitude is like that of Groucho Marx when he joked that: “I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would accept the likes of me as a member.”
Of course, just having high standards isn't wrong, and doesn't cause problems at all. It's a useful attitude, promoting excellent work. It's what you do with the standards that matters. Aim for your best, the best you can manage – the best that's practically achievable by you in the particular circumstances. You don't need to be phenomenal all the time. Just be an ordinary, everyday Superman.
It’s okay to shoot and miss
Aim at perfection, by all means, but don't insist on reaching it. You can use the stars to navigate, but don't actually expect to reach them every time you leave the house.
Learn to challenge your assumptions about how awful it would be to be slightly imperfect. Ask yourself if it would really matter if you didn't leave your spice rack in accurate alphabetical order?
When it comes to parenting, the goals and standards you set will determine how your child develops:
- Never let a child feel love is conditional on being a Superkid.
- Help them set priorities, select tactics, identify resources, and practice realistic self-evaluation.
- Help them to see flops and mistakes as chances to learn how to avoid that outcome next time.
- Praise their efforts and not only the results.
- Never emphasise flawlessness as a trait.
- Teach them to accept their mistakes as a lesson on what to do differently next time.
Where perfectionists apply similarly excessive aims to others, this spoils relationships and overall performance, so don't merely export or project your perfectionism.
Your aim should be to accept that you’ll make new mistakes, and to realise that if you learn as much as possible from each of them, and fine-tune your performance, you need not keep on making the same mistakes each time, and can continue to grow and develop.
- (M. A. Simpson, psychiatrist)
