Unlearning perfectionism
arunkprasad.com
arunkprasad.com
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 through a canyon, on a straight and narrow highway, or going the wrong way. But all you know for certain is what is in front of you.
The second is that you have to frame your perfectionism around something. That could be your loved ones, your dreams in life, whatever. If it's always framed around your past achievements, you're comparing to the past and not to the future version of what could be. Getting clear on why you're doing it is very important.
I truly believe you can devoid yourself of perfectionism. I've gone from being afraid to publish work to the public, to only publishing in the public and shaping my work based on the imperfections being pointed out in my shitty first attempts.
Your first attempt will be shitty. Your second attempt will be less shitty. Do this for long enough and you'll start to get a feel for proficiency and what others see as "perfection".
that's all you need to drive ar night though (and driving in general)
if you drive looking around you, you can become a danger for yourself and others.
What I mean is that perfectionism is doing things the right way and make the best out of the limits you encounter.
I feel like many confuse perfectionism with obsession.
Perfectionism = not bad
Obsession = bad
Perfectionism = not bad
Obsession = bad "
It just depends how you define terms. What most people here mean with perfectionism, would be probably a obsession with perfectionism under your terms.
I am also fine with my perfectionism, after I learned the concept of "good enough".
It only depends on where you are in the spectrum
Everyone is a perfectionist in something, but only someone is obsessed with perfectionism to the point it becomes bad for you.
That's what usually people think about when they talk about perfectionism, but that's the worst case scenario.
My dictionary defines perfectionist as “a person who refuses to accept any standard short of perfection”. That is the standard definition you will find most people understand as the meaning of the word. For more precise use in a technical context, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfectionism_(psychology)
>> Perfectionists strain compulsively and unceasingly toward unattainable goals, and measure their self-worth by productivity and accomplishment. Pressuring oneself to achieve unrealistic goals inevitably sets the person up for disappointment. Perfectionists tend to be harsh critics of themselves when they fail to meet their expectations. [...]
>> Perfectionism can be damaging. It can take the form of procrastination when used to postpone tasks and self-deprecation when used to excuse poor performance or to seek sympathy and affirmation from other people. These, together or separate, are self-handicapping strategies perfectionists may use to protect their sense of self-competence. In general, perfectionists feel constant pressure to meet their high expectations, which creates cognitive dissonance when expectations cannot be met. Perfectionism has been associated with numerous other psychological and physiological complications. Moreover, perfectionism may result in alienation and social disconnection via certain rigid interpersonal patterns common to perfectionistic individuals.
“Doing things the right way” is an idiosyncratic personal definition. You should find a different word for this if you want people to understand you. Or perhaps you could use “competence”, “proficiency”, “fastidiousness”, “judiciousness”, “practicality”, “adaptability”, “success”, or some other existing word, depending on the context.
This is 'being a reasonable homo sapiens'. Perfectionism is having absurd expectations and refusing to do anything unless they're met.
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.
But if I decide on particular concepts of good for this story, suddenly the path becomes clarified. And so I might select a theme to explore, a word or a phrase like "sunshine on a cloudy day", and then develop the basis of the story by making the contents abductively(as in abductive reasoning) similar to that theme - by inventing characters, settings and plot devices that would suggest similar ideas and then seeing how I could make them work together. As I add more, additional themes and principles might come up and I would navigate their use by looking for ways in which they are compatible with the primary theme. If there are contradictions between two themes, then I will have to resolve them or else drop exploration in that direction.
And you can see that there is a lot of work that would go into developing the story from a set of themes into a finished narrative, but it is also not work that would go in circles; there is a start and end to it, a point at which it definitely communicates the theme, and does so efficiently. The rest is a matter of adding some polish, smoothing out the particulars of the telling. It would only grow unbounded and become a truly "perfectionist" endeavor if I allowed too many contradictory elements to slip in and create problems, or burdened myself with too many technical constraints like those found in a top 10 or "do's and don'ts" list of quick-fixes. That advice can solve particular problems, but it comes after having a good foundation.
I see myself in this article but for me, the word that was the key to find resources to get better was the broader acronym RNT, "Repetitive negative thoughts". Perfectionism themes are one common type of thought for me, but I also have several other categories that don't fit in that frame. Two resources I found particularly useful:
* https://www.amazon.com/Negative-Thoughts-Workbook-Repetitive... "The Negative Thoughts Workbook" A practical self-help book with chapters to work through each common category of negative thought
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672052/ "Constructive and Unconstructive Repetitive Thought" A survey in the clinical literature which I found particularly helpful for identifying the subset of negative thoughts which has been actually helping me. This helped me ease up on the majority of unhelpful thoughts with greater confidence that I'm still preserving the small subset of my thought pattern which has helped me succeed.
As a tangent I would add that the damage isn't limited to the perfectionist. At some point one has to consider how the rigidity of perfectionism affects their relationships. It can be a self-indulgence in which one engages at the expense family or friends.
It’s even worse if the perfectionism is applied to those around you directly. The thought process is something like “well I hold myself to a high (but maybe poorly defined and changing) standard, so why not hold those in my life to that same standard!?”
Of course it is impossible for anyone to live up to your nebulous and nonverbal “standard”, so you see your close relations primarily in terms of how they are deficient. And because what comes around goes around, you assume others are perceiving you in the same way.
You may actually find yourself surrounded by people with obvious issues like addiction and depression so it easy for you to perceive exactly how much more perfect you are than they are, and of course you remind them of this frequently through backhanded comments that let them know that they are almost good enough to be your equal. It takes a certain kind of person to regularly take that abuse, so your warped reality self-selects for friends that are obsequious puddles or anxious wrecks. Thus begins a feedback loop that reinforces everyones mental health issues, with you being the pump that brings water from the well.
It’s a bucket of fun for everyone!
Seems like a lot hinges on your parenthetical.
If Bob has a well-defined and consistent standard that works for him, what's wrong with filtering Eve out of his life with it?
- like you say they maintain a healthy surface because part of their perfectionism is no one knowing about their anxiety / having a good image
- if they do share, often their goals / expectations will be inflated compared to that of their peers such that for others it feels like they're bragging or being ridiculous, instead of taking their pain seriously. I notice this especially with when I share dissatisfaction about my school results - disparate expectations create a true divide.
dismissive comments at a young age evolve to be tactful but still echo deafeningly from adolescence, in my exp.
If you can't stop whatever is fueling negative habits / emotions, even if it looks noble or whatever (learning, art, sport, perf, love) .. it's probably not good.
The first time I went to a psychologist, they couldn't rule out things like ADD/ADHD, but simply ended the examination (after 3 interviews), and concluded with "could be due to traumatic childhood" - which I did not have. In the journal, they noted that I had graduated from University, had a steady white-collar job, no crime record, in a relationship, and other things which ADHD patients would apparently struggle with.
Went for a second opinion, and got diagnosed with non-hyperactive ADHD (previously called ADD).
> She dwells in puddles for fear of the ocean
woah. Beautiful line. Great writing can really make the content more impactful. I find myself regularly absorbed in the minutia of a technology used in a project. I tell myself it's because I find the subject fascinating and knowing it deeply will make the solution (and me) better (which is partly true), but I often have that thought niggling in the back of my mind, "Am I spending too long on this detail because I'm avoiding tackling the bigger problem because I'm worried I might fail?". This punchy quote sums that up nicely.
The philosopher John Perry has a humorous essay called "Procrastination and Perfectionism" that gets to the heart of the matter in a different way:
> Many procrastinators do not realize that they are perfectionists, for the simple reason that they have never done anything perfectly, or even nearly so. […] Perfectionism is a matter of fantasy, not reality.
(More at https://web.archive.org/web/20111120152858/http://www.struct...)
Minor pedantic point about the aticle: IIRC, the quote about Gauss from E. T. Bell was more about Gauss "hiding his tracks" like a fox with its tail ("Had he divulged what he knew"…) rather than taking too long because of perfectonism.
(This comment was typed with a 5-minute timer! It feels very uncomfortable to just hit submit without cleaning it up, but I've come to realize that that discomfort is part of growth.)
The quote about the fox does not seem to be in Bell's book, but some stuff about it here: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/3610/what-is-the-ori...
The notion that perfectionism can be harmful reminds me of that.
.. Paul Morphy
It doesn't just have to be perfect results. It can also be emotional relationships with other people, getting a job or a promotion, winning a contest/game, an imagined endgame, etc.
I don't think there's a damn thing wrong with setting a high bar; possibly unreasonably high, as long as I have a healthy reaction to that bar not being met.
I remember reading about "fuzzy logic," way back, when that was still a thing. One description had "levels," where you had things like "On, almost on, not on, cat in a box, not off, almost off, off," etc. Basically, a continuum, with "detents."
That's sort of how I work. I set a bar for "perfect," but will settle for "almost perfect," or maybe even "very good." I will not settle for "good," or lower.
My identity is not tied into my work, but I am constantly striving for approaching perfection in my work.
If I don't at least get "very good," I don't beat myself up, but the job's not done.
I like to stay at a 1-digit bug count, with that digit being "0," if at all possible.
I have a development technique that is afforded by the tools I use, and the platform. I call it "Constant Beta." I also do what I call "Evolutionary Design," where I refine the actual project plan and design, as I proceed.
Basically, I keep the app at ship quality, from the very beginning. If I encounter bugs -any bugs- at any time during development, I stop all forward development, until the bug has been fixed.
I test a lot. I tend to use test harnesses, or the integrated app, as opposed to unit tests. Unit tests are applied, once functionality has been established; and only for those parts of the system that makes sense. I like to break projects out, into standalone packages, with discrete lifecycles. I often publish these, as open source.
I like to do full integration testing, as soon as possible. Almost all of my testing is done on the whole system (which might be incomplete, with stubs and mocks).
"Constant Beta" means that I start releasing TestFlight beta to my team, as soon as possible. As an example, I have been working on the project that is my current obsession, since September 5th, of 2020 (first commit). I have been making TestFlight releases, since October 6th, 2020. I've made well over 500 TestFlight releases, in that time. I'll have to count the tags, but it may be over 600, by now.
If you know anything about TestFlight, you know that Apple vets the releases (but not as stringently as for release into the App Store). They won't approve a TestFlight release, unless the app is already quite substantial, and doesn't crash. In fact, in one release, Apple helped me to spot a bug, because they made it crash in a way that had escaped my testing, and rejected the build.
I can scare up a full-fledged, "shippable" app, in a few days. All the time since, has been spent adding functionality to the app, testing, refining, testing, pivoting, testing, refactoring, testing, removing functionality, testing, going back to the drawing board, testing, etc.
All the while, keeping a cadence of multiple releases per day (once the first release has been made of a version, builds are approved almost immediately).
Tends to keep the quality high.
Procrastination appears to be determined by interactions between the cognitive-related (prefrontal cortex) and affective-related (limbic system, default mode network) functions. There is a trade-off between the top-down cognitive and bottom-up affective systems.
It appears that affective processing can override top-down control signals for short-term satisfaction, or worst since the hyperactivity of the default mode network was observed in mental disorders.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308046561_Identifyi...
Perfectionism could be how the mind copes with the failures of top-down control.
Makes sense, I had an unfortunate childhood, and it took a long time to gain control over my hyperactive affective functions, and I'm a recovering perfectionist. Self-compassion works.
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 major childhood illness, death of a friend, etc.
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.
Many, many people I have known over the years have not been so lucky.
Pretty sure it never hit a pathological point though, which something like OCD definitely is.
The way to turn it into a better coping skill is to evaluate where it is and is not helpful - it’s almost certainly has not always been wasted effort, though for folks in particularly bad places, maybe it has. CBT has a really useful ‘Worry Worksheet’ which can help walk people through and reality test things like this, which can help tease it apart.
Prioritizing self care is also key, as when it is a problem it’s usually because other important things aren’t getting addressed (like rest, or positive social interactions) because someone is hyper focusing on perfecting one specific thing, and necessarily unable to tackle the other things that are important to be functional. This leads to a spiral of less and less ability to be functional, which rightfully will trigger anxiety and the maladaptive behavior even more. Hopefully the person is able to snap out of it, or environmental/external factors stop it, but that doesn’t always happen.
If someone was in a situation where they ended up in a unexpectedly bad situation or emergency as a kid, this is probably one of the better ‘bad coping skill’ ways of handling it.
Other, even less helpful but common coping skills for that kind of trauma include:
- pretending that the problem is not or could never actually be a problem (delusion)
- avoiding any reminders of the problem (avoidance)
- attacking others as the cause of the problem, when they aren’t (deflection, finger pointing)
- making the problem someone else’s problem in a destructive way (usually using manipulation, gaslighting, abuse)
And many more.
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.
There are a whole class of issues, including PTSD, Anxiety, Depression (and related or semi-related stuff like perfectionism), that are not so much that the behavior or feeling is bad or wrong in any absolute sense - it’s just not useful or appropriate in the current environment and it is causing distress and life problems because of it. There are plenty of life circumstances where any of those states could be appropriate and would help the person. PTSD in the checkout line at the grocery store is clearly not one of them.
More nuanced research over time seems to be discovering it’s sometimes less about ‘smash the symptoms with a hammer forever’ (heavy medication) and sometimes it’s more about unblocking whatever is stuck that is stopping the person from learning and adjusting appropriately to what IS actually happening, and process whatever was going on before, so they can get out of the ‘stuck’ bad state.
This does include medication, among other things sometimes. Sometimes it’s also changing environment, removing bad influences/people, living support, etc.
Definitely not applicable to everyone. But applicable to a surprising number of cases.
I also think the forces you mention are at play across all society.
I think a lot of it comes down to uncertainty: I don't know what will happen and I want to know what will happen. I don't know if people will love me, hate me, or ignore me, and if so, how they'll do it, and so much of that uncertainty can drive me into trying to control as much as I can (or think I can).
For me, perfectionism seems to lie in that fear of the unknown and trying to mitigate as much (read: squash/eliminate) of the uncertainty instead of recognizing that we're human beings and so many things are outside of our control.
As a person with a lot of unresolved trauma (and perfectionism issues), I hate the term "unresolved trauma". I've been working hard with a therapist and a psychologist for years, and I've made a ton of progress, but my trauma will never be truly resolved. Every few years some new facet of damage will pop up that I won't expect and will have to work through.
It's a never ending process, and (imo) the term unresolved trauma implies that there should be a point where it becomes resolved. That's just not realistic or true for a lot of people.
But I could be wrong.... (Says the perfectionist, letting himself off the hook if he is wrong, which he may very well be because he's talking out his ass)
I've even seen therapists who claimed that I could completely 'heal'. But that's a perfectionist attitude itself, which had me banging my head against the wall for too long.
I think the truth is far closer to 'able to live a satisfying life in spite of'
Kudos to you for identifying that for yourself and trying to distance from it!
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.
(I'm actually pitching the reverse situation at work. People keep chasing big wins to improve our system and then taking forever to deliver half of what they suggested at the start. Especially where performance is concerned. Meanwhile I'm knocking out little gains that are 20% of what they're chasing but doing it every fortnight to a month. Six months of 2% a week is 40% overall, and that would beat anything these jokers have delivered in four years.)
this is brilliant if it was intentional.
You don't want perfectionism.
> "It will work, even if we're a little late"
We should all aspire to reach this attitude in development teams. As long as you keep putting the work in until the product is polished we're fine.
perfectionism, like many other behavioral styles, is a spectrum
Most of the "perfectionists" are people that simply care a lot more than the average about details, not sociopaths.
Katsuhiro Otomo is a perfectionist, but he also enjoys his life and creating his art.
p.s. perfectionists most of the time acknowledge that thinks will work anyway, they simply also believe (and rightly so) that things could be better than they currently are. Most of the times they also know that perfection (or an incarnation of it) takes a lot of time.
We only talk about the extreme cases because of survival bias: they are the ones who will make extreme sacrifices, while the others will give up on perfection sooner or later, because they are not actually obsessed with it.
Feeling personally attacked
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I'm glad CBT and mindfulness is coming more to light, because it really did change my life. I no longer let my thoughts control me, but rather, I control my thoughts.
As I was reading the article there were sentences where how I view myself and the reality clashed and it elicited a familiar feeling of avoidance and discomfort. I am not that biased towards action as I'd like to believe. Let me hide from that ugly truth.
It's all about you at the end.
Incels want their life to read like the perfect romance novel, and hoarders want to achieve the perfect utilisation of resources.
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Jokes aside, I think we all are and aren't imposters, in different areas of life.
What spec you need is based on the goal. You can build cars using different specs and you may achieve a luxury car or an every sedan and both have "succeeded" if they meet their specs and sell to their respective markets
1. Make sure to find a launch customer. It’s easy to get stuck in endless trade studies without a real customer. Real customers bring real constraints that make decisions easier.
2. Focus on improving upon the baseline rather than achieving perfection. It’s still important to ask if the improvement is big enough to warrant the investment, but don’t get trapped into rejecting better solutions simply because they aren’t perfect solutions.
1- "Done is better than perfect" ... I read that phrase from an article posted in HN last year (I guess)
2- Incorporate the Agile mindset into my life for any kind of achievement. MVP oriented and always thinking "what can I done today with the amount of energy/resources I have for today/this week?"
Thank you, Anand!
Edit: Also at least two, soon possibly three (or all four?) points on the bullet list in Section IV.