Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

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I'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 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".

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.

I like the idea: do you have any examples of it in practice?

I often apply it from the beginning for creative projects. For example if I am writing a story, I will need to consider "what makes a good story". If I were to develop the benchmark for this by consulting a list of "top 10 ways to make a good story," or did my research by looking at best-sellers, then I would only be capable of writing cliches. It would be very hard to get off of the blank page without just copying a complete work and then trying to modify parts.

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.

Thanks for sharing. That is a good strategy to try as I do often let things go either unbounded with no constraints or with too many constraints.

> 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.

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 is doing things the right way and make the best out of the limits you encounter.

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.

"I feel like many confuse perfectionism with obsession.

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 just depends how you define terms

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.

> perfectionism is doing things the right way and make the best out of the limits you encounter

This is 'being a reasonable homo sapiens'. Perfectionism is having absurd expectations and refusing to do anything unless they're met.

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