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The goal of standards is to improve our future actions

neelnanda.io

260 pointsneelnanda111 comments

A few years ago, I made a new year's resolution to be more forgiving to myself. At the time, I would feel miserable at the end of the day for, say, not doing laundry even though I had resolved to do so. I would downright hate myself for not getting this simple task done despite having had the time.

So, that year, whenever I would have such a thought, I'd tell myself that I forgive my past self. "It's ok!"

And it has been extremely effective! I don't think I procrastinate less (or more) on laundry nowadays, but I can't remember the last time I went to bed feeling terrible about myself. It almost feels absurd to me now to think about, but it's actually been life-changing. And it required no money, no explicit commitment, no lifestyle changes, no time taken out of every day. Just a small but persistent voice objecting to the self-loathing.

Downsides might include being overall more apathetic and possibly less motivated - but that might also be an illusion. I don't know, it's hard to compare to beforehand, and I don't think terrorizing yourself is particularly effective in the first place. But even if I had to choose, I would definitely pick "slightly less productive" over "self-hatred".

People say to love/respect yourself. Not hating yourself is a pretty foundational step in that :)

When I punish myself I find I shrink or cringe away from the subject of concern, rather than motivated to engage with it

Depression is the greatest enemy of doing anything, feeling bad is basically always a net negative on productivity

I identify strongly with this. I’m overall functional, even reasonably successful, in work. But in work and even more strongly in personal matters, I can shrink away from unpleasant items well past the point of it being reasonable.

I’ve literally wasted dozens of hours avoiding a task that ends up taking 15 minutes. Could be a phone call, dealing with some minor tax or DMV issue, writing a simple but important email, or whatever. Often paperwork or tedious phone call related, but it’s clearly not productive behavior.

But if you don’t mind me asking—what happens when you, well, don’t have the laundry done, and you realize you actually really need a clean shirt? (Or whatever.)

I think this approach only works if you're already too hard on yourself. If you live like a slob and tell yourself to continue living like a slob then it's not going to help you much.

You can alternatively decide that despite the fact that you "live like a slob" you are sufficiently happy, healthy, and productive. And that the standard that says "this is slobbery" (which comes from projecting an external viewpoint) is not relevant to you, so you can ignore it.

(You can also substitute any X, where X is not harmful behavior, for "slobbery".)

speaking as a procrastinator. I wear a dirty shirt (or whatever). And no one cares, or probably notices, and the world doesn't implode.

Does it stop at not doing the laundry “or whatever”? Or does your procrastination sneak into other aspects of your life?

Pretty much everything. It sometimes causes mild annoyance to people, or forces me to drop everything to get something done. But as a wise man told me "if you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute.".

Speaking as somebody who used to have to sit close to others in a cube farm; we do notice, you stanky bastard.

At the risk of being ELIZA, what is it you are afraid will happen which you think self-hate is protecting you from? The answers are probably distorted by fear instead of a realistic appraisal of what will actually happen. How often do you "actually really need" a clean shirt as a matter of serious consequence? And when you do, do you really have no options? Could you beg one from a neighbour or buy one at short notice or wash one quickly? If you don't NEED one could you wear a jacket over a less clean shirt? If this is going to worry you could you keep a clean or unopened shirt in the closet for emergency "I didn't do any laundry" wear only, just to guard against this situation?

> "what happens when you, well, don’t have the laundry done, and you realize you actually really need a clean shirt? (Or whatever.)"

Sensible answer, ideally you say to yourself "I don't have a clean shirt, what options do I have?" and consider the best available option and use it, absent the self-hatred and judging and putdowns and bad feelings and stuff which isn't helping anyway.

[Edit: I missed something major in this response; it's not necessary to make all the bad feelings go away entirely and be happy with everything. It's more that you can choose - if feeling bad does help motivate you to do the laundry, keep some of it. It's the "I didn't do laundry, I'm 100% a terrible person, a lazy slob worse than everyone, I fail at everything I don't deserve to live, woe woe" spiral which is an overkill response. You might decide to keep 50% intensity self anger, or 10% intensity self-ticking-off or 5% intensity self-eye-roll. Whatever you decide is enough suffering to be motivating, if any.]

As I understand OPs story, that happens with or without the self hate.

Figuring out a way to get the laundry done should in theory be easier once you are not being bullied by yourself.

I definitely fall into some of these patterns; that being said there’s a pretty likely chance of me just buying new clothes

This is the basis of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT); hating oneself or forgiving oneself are behaviours of the mind (cognition), and the idea is that we can fall into negative behaviours and get stuck there, and can learn positive behaviours instead.

A realted sticking point is when we can't learn positive beahviours, because we don't want to give up the negative ones - e.g. "I deserve to hate myself for not doing the laundry, only a disgusting slob does no laundry and is happy about it, at least I have the virtue of self-hate" and then changing involves debugging why that behaviour is stuck and unsticking it.

Ten common cognitive distortions that lead to self loathing, anxiety, depression, and others are described here: https://www.verywellmind.com/ten-cognitive-distortions-ident...

Dr Burns' podcast talking through all the techniques he's developed for identifying and changing and overcoming these is here: https://feelinggood.com/list-of-feeling-good-podcasts/ he also has a new book out, and charges therapists for using his materials, but the podcast is entirely free.

I think Dr Burns' development of techniques to unstick the "I want to change but I don't deserve to change" predicament is something which could help lots of internet people who are depressed, anxious, miserable, self-loathing, and lots of people who have been going to therapists for years talking over issues but unable to change them, and is something that overlaps with what people want from meditation and from gurus like Eckhart Tolle, but is much more practical with techniques you can try (probably with a therapist, but maybe alone) and confirm whether they worked not in minutes rather than years.

Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT), as a further development of CBT, seems to be even better geared towards forgiveness, acceptance and commitment to the goals you actually deeply care about. (Haven't tried it personally though)

A great overview here: https://www.metafilter.com/182938/We-Hurt-Where-We-Care

I can recommended ACT for folks with depression largely stemming from life situations (as opposed to clear medical issues).

The death of my parents (among other life events) has been difficult for me and ACT has helped.

I had a similar realization after reading Radical Compassion by Tara Brach. The concept of the two darts of suffering in Buddhism has also been extremely valuable to me. The first dart is the immediate pain (laundry didn't get done) and the second dart is the self-inflicted pain caused by the stories we tell to ourselves ("I can't even get a simple load of laundry done, I am a terrible person who will never accomplish anything.") It's usually the second dart that causes the most suffering despite being entirely created in our own heads and self inflicted.

Thank you for this reference - it's taken me on a lovely journey of reading!

Counter-acting this negative train of thought is a goal of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for depression, and it's very successful. But also way more expensive than pills.

I had an interesting experience with this a few years ago when I went through some pretty bad depression and anxiety. My first step of getting better was rejecting the bad feelings saying to myself "These feelings don't make sense. Stop feeling them" and that made me feel a bit better. But to really improve I had to make the realization that the feelings are a part of myself even if I don't want them to be, and that I can do better even if I don't feel good.

>>goal of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for depression, and it's very successful. But also way more expensive than pills.

short term, maybe, but I bet its cheaper long term :)

My personal mantra is (roughly):

Be forgiving with your past, disciplined with your present, hopeful with your future.

I'm not a Buddhist or religious at all for that matter. But I've come to appreciate the power of rituals, prayer, meditation and spirituality in some sense. In the Sermon of the Mount it is said that sin starts in the mind (very roughly paraphrasing). In Buddhism there is the concept of planting seeds, karma, with our thoughts and actions.

I understand these things as powerful concepts, packaged as stories and metaphors. They can help us to face difficult emotional challenges (fear, hatred, pride etc.) in two ways: By preparing our minds through a form of mental hygiene and by drawing from fantastic/spiritual frameworks in overwhelming situations.

So the mantra above is a way for me to operationalise a kind of healthy self-reflection (I tend to over-reflect) and put different types of thoughts and motivations into context. It helps!

The problem Is I see reminders to my failures constantly (I have mint.com open on one of my monitors). I can’t easily escape being an abject failure because of my lack of social class and status.

It sounds like you are being unfair to yourself, perhaps brutally so. Would you consider others of your social class and status abject failures?

That’s why people do things like religion—it gives you a way to establish purpose and meaning that is independent of your economic standing or potential.

That sounds deeply painful. Why choose to keep a constant reminder up? If you're lucky you'll be able to forget about it for a brief instant but it sounds like you have intrusive thoughts that won't let you forget. There's medication for that, among other things, if you so choose.

Recognizing failure is a good thing. Now it really depends how we see failure. I like to see it as opportunity to grow.

The worrying thing here is that you associate a specific failure with your being: "being an abject failure". Ridiculous! You know better. Class and status are just smoke and mirrors.

I sincerely hope you realize that you are not defined by the numbers on some website, will face your challenge head on, grow stronger on every step and most importantly recognize that you are not alone with this.

Be good to yourself, this is the true antidepressant.

> Downsides might include being overall more apathetic and possibly less motivated (but that might also be an illusion

FWIW, Sidartha might say “You’ve given up frivolities and potentially closer to giving up desire. You’re one step closer to enlightenment.”

The symptoms of enlightenment (“a positive”) are the same as apathy and lacking motivation (“a negative”). Everything is a matter of framing :). I’m glad you’ve chosen a mental model that frames your imperfections as learning opportunities rather than justification for self-punishment.

Yup.

One of the most eye-opening perspectives for me was to ask myself -- how would I judge a friend if it were them rather than me? In this case, if a friend didn't do their laundry that day?

Suddenly I realized I was holding myself to a standard 10x what I was expecting of anyone else. And stopping that was life-changing. It just took deciding to treat myself as kindly as I treat others.

Just like you -- I still get basically the same amount of stuff done, or maybe 90% of before -- but stop feeling horribly guilty about myself all the time. And if I lost 10%, it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

It strikes me as weird to address an issue of unrealistic standards by implementing a bunch of productivity systems (pomodoro, etc) and data collection schemes, since these systems are fallible, which feeds right back to the anxiety loop.

I feel like it's appropriate to bring up meditation, and specifically self-awareness. There's something about seeing yourself as a third party that helps put things into a larger context and helps us "let go".

It's good to have data. "I'm unproductive" vs "I choose to spend my time doing X". It's a lot easier to be more productive by "watching 15 minutes less of tv" when you know you watching 3 hours a night.

Pomodoro isn't a productivity system. It's "I'm going to focus for ~15 minutes", and that's much easier to do than "spend 8 hours working".

Having more data isn't always better. For example, there are certain medical diagnosis protocols that basically involve going down a predetermined list of rote checks precisely because studies show that getting extra information ends up leading the doctor to make poorer diagnoses.

Looking at the article, one example of data collection is "I know that I write at about 20-30 WPM" (the implication being that the author feels pressured to write at a minimum level of "efficiency"). Coupled w/ pomodoro, it essentially becomes a pressure to write X words in Y minutes, lest feelings of inadequacy hit later upon reflection. This to me feels borderline unhealthy: "what if I forgot to measure", "what if I under-deliver", etc are all possible psychological sinkholes.

What meditation promotes is asking yourself what exactly happiness means to you personally, and observing how expectations and accomplishments play a role towards your objectives. Sometimes yes you just need to recognize that you need to get off your ass and do the work, but sometimes it's a matter of prioritization, sometimes less is more.

I found when I tried doing this "calibration" phase, that it's not just about sheer time spent on a task.

A task that took three 1-hour sessions is often not doable in one 3-hour session, because you lose creative productivity after a bit of time. That was my first mistake when trying to estimate how long things would take.

Instead, now I calibrate based on time as well as sessions, so I know preparing a new 80-minute lecture (for a class) takes two 5-hour sessions: the first 5-hour session to outline the class and activities, gather the major sources and bullet points I want to make; then the second 5-hour session to put together the polished version of slides and activity script, and do a 60-minute mental run-through.

Same with a lot of other tasks. Some are short but need multiple sessions, like writing recommendation letters that will be closely read. Even though it's easy to write the 2 pages in about 30 minutes, it rarely gets the right tone, and needs at least one or two more 20-minute sessions to capture the applicant's character as clearly as possible.

Indeed. The author describes the problem very well but their solution doesn’t seem right.

This was my immediate reaction as well. The entire article feels like it is attempting to solve a problem using the exact same kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place.

I think meditation is great, but I am more inclined toward the Western religious traditions that state “faith without works is dead”. Getting outside of yourself by helping others is a much more concrete and visceral experience, with similar results on your mental landscape.

It is a pretty tough task to measure how productive you are (for the sake of better expectations). Assuming you do succeed at measuring your maximum productivity. The you have to measure is your distribution of productivity over time. This again is quite a tough task. A short cut is to just not beat yourself up over your productivity on a given day. Granted, that maybe easier said than done, but maybe that is what the OP should strive for. Or, maybe he is on the path to doing that.

I was diagnosed in my thirties with a congenital condition. I decided "I need to start making more Bs if I'm ever going to get anywhere."

Twenty years later, I look back on my high expectations and realize that I was inculcated with them in childhood and also got a lot of support in childhood for being able to hit those performance marks in school. Growing up and leaving home meant I still had high expectations but I didn't necessarily have the support I needed to meet them.

I still have high standards but I'm more able to embrace ideas like "The perfect is the enemy of the good" and "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."

I'm happy at the moment with some of my accomplishments that probably don't look especially impressive to a lot of outsiders. Maybe they seem unpolished or not slick or not meeting some metric some outsider thinks matters. But they are meeting metrics I think matter, metrics that are hard to hit at all. And sometimes the fact that others think it's messy or second rate is a feature, not a bug, for my purposes.

> Anything worth doing is worth doing badly

TIL - Thanks for sharing that kernel.

Along these lines, I find it to be really important to have things that I do not do well, and that I do not optimize.

I tend to research and over-optimize every activity I do. Part of that is the fun I find in a hobby - I like to learn how to do it at the absolute best level (or how the professionals do it). But in doing so, I've found that I need to be OK not being the best, and when I don't hit that mark, improve my appreciation for those who can (and justify paying the professionals to do it).

An example is BBQ. I did tons of research, and there are setups that run $1,000s. One can spend days cooking, and months to procure and dry wood. It can range from fully manual to fully automated. I enjoy making good BBQ, but have accepted the fact that enjoying the research and the process is as important as the end product, and if the end product is great, then it's a bonus. Usually I can be consistently good, if not a little dry.

Same thing with cooking. I am not often restaurant quality with most of my dishes, because restaurants can use ingredients that don't make sense at home. But I try to aim for excellence, and when I miss, I get slightly better, and appreciate when someone serves a truly excellent meal.

Music is another thing. Few people know that John Mayer is playing a $15,000+ guitar [1] through a $7,000 pedal (among others) [2] hooked up to an amplifier that you cannot purchase unless the guy decides to make it for you, at which point it could be $150k or more [3]. Do I need that equipment to play guitar? Absolutely not, but learning about it was interesting and gave me a better appreciation for what I'm seeing on stage (and why spending $100 to see it and hear it in person may be worth it).

I also find starting with the extremes and dialing it back allows me to better decide the potential for a given hobby. If I don't do research, I may be running into pain that I didn't realize was easily fixed (e.g. getting a glove in golf).

That said, being OK with being OK is something I'm working on.

[1] https://reverb.com/item/5564625-prs-john-mayer-super-eagle-i... [2]https://reverb.com/p/klon-centaur-horsie [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumble_Amplifiers

Agree with embracing being bad at some things.

For perfectionists it's basically therapy.

I'm training for a triathlon. I kinda suck at it. Taking me way longer than I had planned, much slower progress.

It's humbling, but also freeing too. It's ok to not optimize every aspect of life. It might take me a year of training to be able to finish a triathlon instead of 3 or 4 months, and I'll likely be in the back of the pack ... so what?

An interesting reaction to what you're saying here for me is, I feel bad and have this bar while doing but when looking back I always see things in a positive way. I'm not sure where this comes from but trying to keep the Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." while doing a thing seems highly valuable to me. Thank you.

I have always struggled with doing things to a level demanded by nobody. Recently though I decided that I’m going to have a BMW ( the stupider and faster the better…) so I’ve found when I answer the question (“is what I’m doing going to get me towards my goal”)

Hi, I’m terrible at navigating HN and I can’t remember my login in order to use anything besides my mobile to post here BUT I saw you replied to a comment of mine 2 months ago regarding CFTR modulators for treating cystic fibrosis. You concluded your response by saying the drugs are prohibitively expensive and I wanted to let you know that if you have any of the qualifying mutations (there are A LOT) you wouldn’t need to pay for the medications as there are funds and grants that will cover the costs of therapy for CF patients. If you want some more information I can try to get you the resources you need. I’ve seen these medications change lives and I hope they will be available for all mutations some day, perhaps yours is already.

The gist:

«And the crux of it is the word could have, the standards we hold ourselves to. This mix of guilt, insecurity and unrealistic standards is a major loss of productivity, and a major source of unhappiness.»

Embrace imperfection, because perfection is unattainable anyway.

That snippet resonated well with me. I think the primary thing I need to personally work on is insecurity. I'm currently learning R in a course I'm taking and I feel as if I'm moving at a snails pace when working on the programming assignments. It's demotivating since I feel like I should be moving faster and I end up feeling. The reality is that I have to accept that there aren't shortcuts and accept the grunt period before I become comfortable with the language. That's just part of life.

Ahh, the obsession with Productivity. Productivity is only required if it is required.

This reminds me of Little Prince meeting The Inventor, who tells him that he invented pills that completely eliminate the need for drinking. The Inventor is happy about saving up to 20 minutes of a person's life with their product. The Prince just thinks to themselves - "weird, if I had an extra 20 minutes I would happily stroll towards a well, then drink very slowly".

What's wrong with being unproductive some of the time, or most of the time? I usually enjoy it a great deal.

completely agree, but unfortunately, Arbeit macht frei!

> What's wrong with being unproductive some of the time, or most of the time? I usually enjoy it a great deal.

"Productive" is a bit of an overloaded word. Myself, when I obsess over my productivity, it's really an obsession over being able to do the things that I set out to do. It's an obsession over being in full control of my own faculties. It has nothing to do with work and business per se.

Well, to be honest I don't think there is that much of a difference. Both in business/at work and in your private life you have to accept the "failure" of reducing your objectives. Then proceed to drink your water, slowly :).

I like to challenge the stereotype with "Live slow, die whenever."

The blogger is a recent grad (hence his example of reflecting how he did on an exam) but the idea he pointed out is universal - some expectation that "what I am doing should feel easy, and if it doesn't then there's something wrong."

I can relate to that feeling but it's also something that is an important (positive!) clue in our work. Speaking plainly: if you're in a place where everything you're doing feels easy, then you're living well bellow your potential.

If everything is easy, it means you're only doing things you know how to do already, which means you're not stretching and growing. When you are feeling a little bit like "I am struggling and borderline failing" - then you know you're pushing, growing and learning.

The important thing is to go through it a few times, so that you recognize that feeling and interpret it as "growing pains" rather than "impending doom"

The author seems to be discussing a form of the “inner critic”. In my personal experience, a severe inner critic seems to be a symptom of unresolved emotional issues due to difficult life experiences / circumstances and unmet needs (in many cases, one could potentially use the word “trauma”, but it is a heavy and loaded word).

Practicing self-compassion, learning how to better process emotions, re-assessing how to live a good life, and changing my circumstances have all been really important for me to get better. The processing of really difficult emotions has been very hard at times but it seems to be necessary part of the process, at least for me :).

I’m not sure if any of this applies to the author, but thought it was worth sharing.

I think the emotional issues are from pushing to hard. There is a time and place for idleness and like sleeping it helps organize the brain and emotions therefore it is highly productive. Cut enough of it and everything you do or make seems to suck - because it does.

Perfectionism is typically a defense mechanism of some sort. This post is trying to fix all the damaged fruit springing from the roots of perfectionism, like trying to stamp out every ant instead of killing the queen.

Sometimes you grew up in a family with a harsh & critical parent, or rewards for progress were minimal, so a spirit of "well done!" is absent. Or maybe you had a personal trauma and the striving is an attempt to avoid pain ever happening again. Or maybe your personal search for significance in life so strongly identifies with something that anything less than perfection in that area reflects badly on you. Or maybe you have shame in your past and you're trying hard to compensate.

Whatever it is, perfectionism is not "solved" with a blueprinted flowchart or life system but by digging deep into a wellspring of grace and worth. For those of us who are Christian, we believe in Jesus' work on the cross as our source of unlimited grace and forgiveness, believing that God has taken care of the perfection gap of our failures. For the rest of the world, well I don't have an answer for you except you may want to take a trip through Paul's letter to the Romans.

Most of the techniques for “life philosophy” in the Bible are cribbed from Greek philosophy with a heap of mysticism stirred in to obscure it all. Just go to the source: the stoics and other Greeks. The dichotomy of control (serenity prayer) predates the Bible by some time, for example.

Sure, if you want to extract the various proverbs, there's plenty of practical and related wisdom. But the stoics had nothing to do with Christ, who is the target of faith in the Bible. Further, the stoics hardly had disciples who were completely broke and yet carried their message far enough to end up sawn in two, tarred and lit on fire, crucified upside-down, beheaded, gutted by swords, etc.

Indeed—the power of an idea is not fully captured in the words that describe it, but rather it gains full force in the stories and images that one associates with it.

And suicide bombers blow themselves up for their faith.

Zeal is not a useful measure for the quality of teachings.

I was raised Catholic and had Paul's letters read to me every week, both in Mass and in Sunday school/CCD.

The Stoics, Buddhism, and CBT proved much more fruitful in finding healthy balance between my aspirations and capabilities.

Religion likes to try and corner the market on the human condition. To be fair even the Greek philosophers had some religious beliefs attached to Stoicism, but what survived of their works that is of use to us here and now was their more generic life philosophy, which is quite practical and beautiful in places.

>Sometimes you grew up in a family with a harsh & critical parent, or rewards for progress were minimal, so a spirit of "well done!" is absent

I feel like this part really explains my tendencies towards perfectionism. In fact I sometimes feel embarrassed when people tell me my work is good.

I do not believe the problem is "standards are too high". It is more about unable to mentally cope with failure properly.

Maybe it also has something to do with the author's world view, where they are who they supposed to be versus who they think they are.

That depends. If your standards weren’t too high you might be able to call it success instead of failure.

Not me. To me, what this article is describing is just poor mental health.

On the other hand, I grew up in a nice middle class family but a family that was basically trivial to do better than.

Maybe things would be different if I had a chip on my shoulder from growing up dirt poor or a chip on my shoulder from an ultra successful parent that is almost impossible to live up to.

> Maybe things would be different if I had a chip on my shoulder from growing up dirt poor or a chip on my shoulder from an ultra successful parent that is almost impossible to live up to.

Neither of these are necessary conditions for poor mental health and/or having high standards for yourself (i.e. being in the target audience of the article). But they can of course have a significant impact.

> poor mental health

This. And you can't change it simply by convincing yourself that your thoughts are irrational.

Labeling thoughts at all can be fraught with peril. Sometimes it’s just best to let them be thoughts. They come and go. I just try to guide and shape them on the “right” path that I think aligns with my goals.

Lots of hate on the font, italics, and writing style. I for one really enjoyed and related to this post. This post does a great job of capturing and elaborating on and providing actionable advice for people who probably tend to beat themselves up when they don't achieve what they expected. I struggle with setting my expectations of myself too high, failing, and then feeling dumb, lazy, etc. So thank you Neel for writing this up and sharing.

Put "Good Enough" next to your first name and be proud.

If you find yourself perfectionist at work, maybe it is just a matter of caring less about work, just enough [1]. It will probably help you meet the deadlines, push less time pressure on everything and everybody and overall get you better outcomes. If something needs to be improved it will. Or it won't, but maybe it's not your problem anymore then. Worse is sometimes better. Sure, keep a high enough standard, but I don't need to tell you that if you are perfectionist, right? Maybe ask people around about that in case of doubt.

In your hobbies, if you find yourself wanting to achieve results you don't reach often enough: first, they are hobbies. You already win if you enjoyed doing something. Then, lower the bar. Take all the time you want on part that interest you. Over-engineer as hell those things if you take pleasure in doing it. But otherwise make it work even if it's worse.

If you program in your hobbies, just write this ugly thing that works. Copy paste that spaghetti code and make it work. It's misaligned but usable? Don't care. Put FIXMEs and move on. You'll have all the time to refine later if it's important to you, when you won't have the burden to make it work anymore and you'll have achieved something, reached a motivating and gratifying step where something works even partly.

Save yourself from cognitive load caused by the need to solve everything at the same time, perfectly and that will stand in your way.

It's less efficient, but it's more efficient.

[1] I wrote about this two days ago in another context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28365945

> push less time pressure on everything and everybody and overall get you better outcomes. If something needs to be improved it will. Or it won't, but then maybe it's not your problem anymore.

Most of what I do I'm either solely or primarily responsible for, and when something breaks, it comes back to me. I've rarely been in situations where something wasn't my problem. By the time it was a 'problem', if someone was contacting me, it was almost definitionally my problem. Not sure how to square that with the advice above, as tempting as it sounds.

The bar is then probably: "can be ugly if it's too much work to do it by the state of the art, but robust enough not to (unexpectedly) break on you at the worst time"

Maybe it's a matter of handling nominal cases, shipping/releasing and only then handling the cases more at the edge (just) after, but with nominal cases out of the way with someone waiting for results and putting pressure while you are working on your stuff. You win the occasion on working on your stuff will less stress, which might as well end up in a more robust result.

For some problems, maybe it's acceptable to handle them when they occur. It could have allowed someone who rely on a feature to use it earlier and be more productive despite this problem, instead of waiting for the perfect solution. It may allow more communication, and therefore more insight, which may help producing better results too.

Thank you for the response. It's a constant effort to find that balance, and it changes as projects and people change.

To be accurate, when I wrote this:

> If something needs to be improved it will. Or it won't, but then maybe it's not your problem anymore.

I had my situation in mind, where I would often find myself wanting something to be improved but unfortunately I'm not the one deciding what gets done. And if I were, I still would not make the decision of doing so because of priorities.

If you suffer from this kind of perfectionism and find it affects your productivity (i.e. in the form of procrastination) I highly recommend reading The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. It's helped me to not only be more productive, but also to feel less guilty and more confident about myself no matter how much I actually get done.

Companies don't actually have standards. They have a list of expectations that are completely subjective. Sometimes the only thing that changes is the person rating you, yet your rating changes drastically. There have been a few times over my relatively short career that I know company/HR policies were violated.

It takes a toll.

Not being specific to this post, but I find writings that have bold or italic in almost every sentence harder to read.

> At this point in this conversation, some part of me starts to feel concerned about complacency. I know that my standards are unrealistic. But they also serve as a big part of my motivation system. And I feel concerned that if I just removed them, that I'd be complacent, and never do anything. And that feels terrifying.

This past year, I’ve noticed in myself a tendency to assume I am naturally unmotivated and need some source of fear, pressure, or extrinsic motivation to get work done.

I’ve also been reading about Taylorism and realized how unhealthy that is. Since realizing it, I have started to work on trusting myself more.

Funny, I've been a devoted fan of Taylorism ever since I read _Cheaper by the Dozen_ as a kid. To me it just means doing things better and faster each day. To you it seems like more of a harsh taskmaster?

Probably not the time or place for extended discussions of Taylorism, but in its original form, it was meant to be applied to product manufacturing, right?

Bit of a disconnect to apply any of that to personal improvement considerations, at least as I see it.

Up until a few years ago, the first thing I would do when I find good content written by someone younger to me is to see if it was a real person. And then I was really pissed off at myself for some reason. Happy at least that part changed. All in all, very well articulated, especially for a recent grad. Cambridge does that I guess. Following your blog and musings now on.

Don’t fear perfection, you’ll never meet it. - Dali

I heard/read this one recently:

"Perfection is a child's fantasy."

A word for this desire to fulfill self-imposed expectations is "ego". The book "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle is essentially about the same realization as the author of this article, along with some management strategies that have a high degree of success (at least for me).

Something that helped me enormously with blogging was when I realized that I had so many posts that I never write finished and published because I didn't think they were perfect enough.

So they I set myself a goal of always hitting publish before I was happy - and always feeling like it could have been better if only I had spent more time on it.

One example: I used to really sweat over having a good closing paragraph. My policy now is to publish without even having that closing paragraph - just write until I run out of things to say and put it live.

This has worked so well for me! I actually publish the things that I write now.

Sometimes I feel like the only cure for perfectionism is to sabotage or rewire the part of our brain which catalogues, sorts and is able to pick one thing as being better/worse than some other thing.

Perfectionism comes from the ability to look around and see the difference between self and the #1 person at that particular task.

The only way to effectively give it a try is not being aware of how awful you are.

Eliminate the "shoulds"! You'll be much happier if you can keep the voice of the foul mouthed Bronx born therapist Albert Ellis in your head: https://youtu.be/u109sVn8zGA?t=1077

Ok, but if you follow this person's advice and set realistic goals, you probably won't toil your whole life toward some unobtainable perfection only to be discovered posthumously, like all the true greats.

Well if they are so great why are they dead? /s

If you are not there to take your bows, then it's kinda pointless anyway...isn't it?

Nobody does the work for the sake of doing the work. People do the work because they want to be recognized.

When I was an awkward high school student trying to meet girls, I had a friend with more experience. His advice to me was, "When all else fails, lower your standards."

I just find that so amusing in retrospect.

During every RCA for an incident caused by me, I go through immense guilt & sadness. Makes me feel how can I make this silly mistake when I expect higher bar for everyone else around me.

To listen https://per.quest/651b73f3bb5d1690d76add9d0064904e.mp3

If you haven't read the book: "Mindset" by Carol Dweck, do yourself a huge favor and read/listen to that book. It completely changed my perspective in life.

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”

― Oscar Wilde

it's easy to get caught up in the tech grind, where you are expected to "hustle" or build a world-changing product 24/7.

I used to get anxious in my free time- like why spend my weekend washing my car when I could work and earn enough per hour to hire someone that could do it instead? but truth is I like doing the mundane tasks as it relaxes me and it's the simple things in life that makes it.

There's you, who you think you are and who you think you're supposed to be or become, but only one of them is real.

e.e. cummings wrote a poem about this, called "Here Is Little Effie's Head"

https://www.poeticous.com/e-e-cummings/here-is-little-effie-...

I like this font.

I also like the font. I just checked and there are two different fonts, the headers use "granville" and the running text uses "brandon-grotesque".

"I’m a perfectionist"

What the blazes is that fount?

Why can’t I find Amanda Huginkiss?

I'm seeing a 404 Not Found.

standards should be as high as possible without hitting mentally unhealthy.

Please change your font. it's too small for that fontface at the very least

Sorry, but the font and vaguely bolding are very, very off-putting. Especially when all but the last letter are bolded, or you have a link that includes the space after it, things start feeling wrong, somehow.

What I did read also had a lot of rambling. That's not necessarily a bad thing in general, as it's a valid style and probably easier to get out there than trying to compress and perfect, but I'm not sure it's going to get you much traction on HN.

I don't know if it was very, very off-putting, but I agree that the length of the piece together with the bolding made it harder to engage with the ideas.

If the author is open to advice, mine would be this:

1. Consider your audience

How might an audience of knowledgeable adults read into a piece that visually emphasizes every idea or phrase the author has decided is important?

Might they feel that the piece is condescending to them? It's possible, and that is indeed how I felt reading the piece.

2. You have a lot of tools to emphasize important ideas. Don't use them all.

Throughout the piece there is a lot of bolding, a lot of italics, and several ideas. Where each distinct clause is a sentence. Where each clause modifies the first subject.

Pick one of these. Maybe two. But don't do everything, or the impact is lessened.

3. Edit yourself mercilessly

Honestly, you're already on the way to editing this down - the important parts are bolded. Cut around them and see how much you can actually afford to lose.

I disagree with this as good advice. I think the post is at a point where any more self-editing would be navel-gazing. Instead, I’d advise first posting it to 1-3 editors whom you trust.

“Consider your audience” is good…but also not very actionable until you make your audience specific.

You're welcome to disagree, but what you're saying is pretty subjective. Self-editing is not "navel-gazing" if you do it right.

> but also not very actionable until you make your audience specific

He posted it to HN himself. Do I really need to be more specific?

> Self-editing is not “navel-gazing” if you do it right

True. But beyond a couple rounds of self-editing, it becomes extremely hard to do it right.

> Do I really need to be more specific?

Yep. HN is a whole bunch of people around the world. Look at what PG does before publishing an essay: 3-6 people whom he knows personally review them.

Your standards are too high.

Oh, yeah? Well you should focus more on improving yourself than on the perceived faults in others!

Start with better definitions for things. Sort out goals from standards, maybe. Also, maybe rethink "anchor points." And the intermittent boldness, while possibly a metaphor for your struggle, is annoying.

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