Taming Perfectionism
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defmacro.org
No matter how you experience it, perfectionism always traces back to a lack of internal self-acceptance. For us who build and produce, it can be a vicious cycle of obsessing over the details, succeeding, and then reaping external validation from others for that success.
However, I would question this approach that says "these external things I make will always be imperfect" instead of simply saying "I internally accept myself, in entirety, for who I am."
The first case only solves issues of perfectionism, while the second - self-acceptance - goes much farther than just addressing perfectionist tendencies.
Serious question. I just get the impression that we have different ideas of what this means, and if we could be more definitive, the 'how to' should become obvious.
This is something I struggle with personally, so I'm very interested to see what others say.
Don't worry, you're not alone, every single person does.
-- How does one accept themselves for what they are?
This is such a deep question that I honestly can't provide an easy answer, and it would be foolish of me to claim that I knew an easy answer. When I say self-acceptance, I'm talking about being entirely at peace with one's self and being completely content in life (true happiness).
Self-acceptance is something that is unique to everyone's own personal situation. Your troubles are different than mine, and my experiences are different than yours. So what you might have to overcome was easy for me, and what I have to overcome may be easy for you.
Nevertheless, since you asked, I personally find I am most at peace with myself through Christianity. I believe that I'm placed here on Earth with a purpose and a plan, and can completely accept myself (faults and all) because I have a God that accepts and loves me unconditionally for who I am, imperfections and all. It really is that simple, and it becomes more self-evident every day that it just plain works.
While religion hardly goes well over the net, I think this board is intelligent enough to understand this one thing:
It is often said that religion is a crutch, but everyone needs a crutch to get through life. For me, the thing that delivers an unshakeable self-acceptance and true happiness is following Christianity.
Good luck on your search, many others are on your path, including myself. =)
I was in my ethics class today and my professor started talking about plato's cave allegory, how one can only know good by doing, not talking (he did note the irony of teaching a class about this), and other such topics.
Eventually he told a story that struck me as very similar to what you describe. He said he met a bunch of Cistercian monks and talked with them a while and that the most interesting thing about them was that they seemed to hold no views about the world. They were supposed to be catholic, but they didn't pray anymore, they didn't seem to care about abortion (as an issue, not that they took a side), they didn't make any assumptions about god's shape. It was radically different from the popular conception of monks.
The professor said that the only thing that they believed in was that god was present, and that the universe was a wondrous thing to behold. They just basked in the glory of existence.
This surprised me, because I thought that the thinking of the most religious people would be radically different from the perspective of science. Both ask why, and have intellectual integrity about it. The major difference between the two is that science constantly asks "how?".
My professor said that the monks acted kind of like they were stoned. Perhaps the true difference between the two prespectives is that the monks are on downers and the scientists are on uppers :-).
Science studies the objective - if other people can't observe an event then it's outside of scientific discourse. Monks do the exact opposite and study the subjective - their own minds. You can't have other people observe your thoughts, but you can talk about them and verify that the processes you go through are similar to the processes of other people.
Monastic lifestyle is absolutely fascinating, from the first glance it might seem incredibly boring. I think of the two retreats as some of the most interesting moments in my life. It's at the very least as fun to do as starting a startup or going to a university.
On the second retreat, no.
You could purposely slightly change the instructions to take detours into all kinds of things, and it seems that most people do, but it probably isn't safe and it isn't the point at all. The faster you can get over the "wow, I could do that without any substances?!" stage and focus on actually watching the layers of your psyche unfold as your mind calms, the better off you'll be.
I stopped believing long ago, and this feeling is the one thing I miss.
Ironically, perfectionism could be just the thing that drove me away from religion. I could not accept to believe in something that does not entirely make sense.
"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."
- Albert Camus, from "The Myth of Sysiphus"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus)
Existentialists such as Camus or Satre would tell you that the universe is an "absurd" and cold place, dictated by the physics of clashing atoms, indifferent to human ideals such as compassion and justice. Human life is "absurd" because while some may subscribe to hedonism to escape the indifferent reality, while other follow some arbitrary set of institutionalized ethics for either hopes of after-life or external validation from society - when the facts remain, everyday we are one day closer to our death, which spells the ceasing of our consciousness and hence, the ceasing of any meanings of our lives because the lofty ideals such as the difference you made for your kids, your family, your community are still "absurd" man-made ideals (just ask the loyal GM employees who've been laid off, or a recently divorced person).
Much of our existential anxiety derives from our reluctance to confront our "absurd" reality or to make it "un-absurd" (i.e., we think that life's unfair, we can code better than Mark Zuckerberg in php and if we were at the right place and the right time, we could have been the Facebook billionaire; so we are going to work hard now, at another Web 2.0 startup). When, in fact, it's just that only in an "absurd" universe's arbitrary lottery, Zuckerberg hits the power ball while you are relegated to mundane, boring 9-5 code monkey job for the rest of your life - no matter how harder you work or how smarter you are than Zuckerberg. Eventually, by your failures alone, you'll begin to even doubt that you are not as smart than Zuckerberg.
Sounds depressing? But Camus/Satre would say, only truth could set you free (besides you always knew it in the back of your head). The world is an indifferent, uncaring place - it sounds horrible, but it means you alone are in control of the meanings in your life.
"Taking the absurd seriously means acknowledging the contradiction between the desire of human reason and the unreasonable world ... The contradiction must be lived; reason and its limits must be acknowledged, without hope. However, the absurd can never be accepted: it requires constant confrontation, constant revolt."
In the end of his essay, Camus declares that "we must imagine Sisyphus happy" for his action of trying to defy death and the gods should by itself satisfy him (gods condemned Sisyphus to his futile labor because he defied death). Translated to startup's or any other modern endeavor, we must confront with the absurdness of our fate (probability says that you will never win the Nobel Prize, start up, literary lottery) but yet constantly defy the "absurdness" (keep trying hard at our goals anyway), because the mere act of constantly trying to defy the universe and create our own values is in of itself meaningful and satiating.
"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."
Not everything that sounds Deeply Wise is actually true.
Try doing math with imperfect proofs and see how long it takes to arrive at a contradiction. Ariane 5 blew up thanks to a floating-point error.
Some things in life require perfection. The error lies in applying the same standard to things that don't.
Either way, what you're saying here is that someone who does a math problem the right way is a perfectionist.
That's correct in one sense of the word, however, under this specific context where we are discussing "perfectionism", doing a math problem the right way does not make one a "perfectionist".
There are a large number of things in our modern world where not shooting for perfection can be disastrous. Space flight is one area, finances is another, weapons targeting a third, etc. Great art is also known by its perfection.
Oh, I don't know about that. Mathematicians obsess over the "beauty" of a proof as much as hackers/programmers obsess over the "beauty" of their code.
For some proving it the ugly way is insufficient.
No. Perfectionism has been the single leading cause of every spaceflight "disaster". http://www.dunnspace.com/leo_on_the_cheap.htm
http://www.dunnspace.com/leo-7-10.pdf
A final area needing cultural change to achieve lower launch costs is one that cuts across virtually every part of government and the aerospace industry that is involved in space system development and operations. [...] Fear of failure, and the consequent lack of tolerance for it, dominates the thinking of many engineers and aerospace managers to the point of having major effect on the design and operation of space systems. [...]
Today’s space leaders in this country need to recapture the spirit and vision of bold adventurism and risk acceptance to open avenues for reductions in space system costs and new space program starts. This will require strong courage by space managers as well as politicians to weather the storms of inevitable failures and continue to press forward. To help ameliorate the emotional, political, and financial impact of failures, the launching of cargo and the launching of people should be forever separated as soon as possible. As the cost of space launch comes down, launches (at least those that are unmanned) will become more routine and more plentiful. This frequent and common unmanned launch activity will allow any occasional accident that does occur to be treated with no more significance than any other accident that does not involve a loss of life or injury to people, or damage to the environment.
I still have this issue about perfectionism. I am constantly reading, trying to perfect my knowledge of the framework I am using, CSS guidelines to ensure that the UI is perfect, patterns book and software development books to make sure I know a code smell, always trying to write the perfect code or pick the perfect color that I have NEVER seen a side project to fruition.
This might have to do with what kirse said - it may have to do with the way I look at myself internally. But it certainly proves to be an impediment. The "fail fast, fail early fail often" matra does not work so well for me, especially when I have complete control over the final outcome.
I will certainly find that book and see if it helps me. But its nice to know someone else was in my shoes, and found a way to work with it, rather than fighting it.
I think there are a lot more people struggling with this problem that any of us realise. Particularly, it would seem, in areas where technical knowledge intersects with endevours that would traditionally be classed at "art".
Personally, I think this has got to be one of the most useful articles I've read in months. This kind of stuff is why I keep coming here.
We are people who build and produce (as someone in the comments so eloquently put it) and let say we set out to build X. X happens to takes a set of inputs and produces a set of outputs. It can be built in many different ways, each of which can be affected by a set of external factors. The effects of many of these factors are under our control, other however are not. We have a vision for X and a vision for how people will use it to accomplish a certain task.
Given all these factors (and many others) we build v1 and end up with X'. We look at X' and realize its not the same as X. The difference is caused (lets assume) due to the set of external factors we ignored, set of inputs that we didn't consider and the resulting set of outputs that we couldn't have expected.
Now it should be clear that X != X' is because we didn't consider all the cases along the way. But as human beings we learn from our mistakes and we iterate and X' grows closer to X over time. The important part here is that we iterate and iterations take time.
The author of the article states that "I knew that real artists ship, but I refused to ship mediocre work, which meant I could never ship anything.". Now does he mean he couldn't ship v1 or that he was awe struck by the discrepancies between X and X' that he couldn't iterate.
I also don't understand this part about "...but embraced via lack of symmetry, respect for blemishes, and unsanitized simplicity.". Does he mean we need to accept that we will never be able to perfect what we do? If so then I think he is wrong. We might not get it right on the first try and depending on the complexity of the task we might not get it right on the 100th try but as human beings you can bet that we wont rest till we get it right.
Perfectionism to me is a result of the process of iteration that is carved into our very being. Being human is not the achievement of perfection or in his case the acceptance of our lack of, it is the pursuit of perfection. And the day I forget that fact is the day I would stagnate and perish.
As a perfectionist myself, let me say that the key is being able to continue working on v1 even when you anticipate the potential for a problem with the finished v1. The perfectionist failure mode is to restart the iteration every single time a potential problem is perceived. The perfectionist cannot stand the idea that anything, even v1, might fail in a way that was remotely preventable. The perfectionist iterates, but the iteration is a very tight loop that is not large enough to collect good feedback. In pathological cases the iteration never leaves the mind.
The obvious problem is that these "mistakes" are far too small to learn anything useful from. It does no good to tell the perfectionist that they have to iterate and learn from failure, because that is exactly what the perfectionist is doing. The problem is that it is more complicated than that - one also has to have the right kind of failures. A person with a healthy attitude towards failure won't even think about it and will naturally tend to let the problem dictate the optimal size of the iteration loop, but the perfectionist will usually always keep their loop too tight to be efficient, or to get anything useful done at all.
Being able to let go of that requires the ability to ignore or accept a certain kind of imperfection. Perfection in the limit requires the acceptance and embrace of permanent lack of perfection everywhere else, but especially in the builder. That is what is so hard for the perfectionist to do.
As soon as I see a potential problem down the road, I lose motivation and want to start over with a fresh approach. But then after that delay, often a new technology/framework/version has appeared that would make things so much easier/better/faster, and I start over again.
Client work has deadlines that force you to finally make compromises, but it's enormously more difficult to do work for yourself.
I am righjt now in the I-dont-careab-out-perfection mode, which actually feels nice. This is so because I had a boring winter break without much contact with people, so when college started up again, I didn't care ab out being obsessed over stupid things, I'm just happy to be taking a lot of classes, where the fine details are just so minute to me right now.
So I can tell you right now that yes, acceptance of yourself (e.g. confidence) is true. Another is trusting your intuition 100%. Inotherwords, I had decided to let my left-brain just take care of things without worrying about the beautiy, structure, form, etc that the right-brain always doubts us to. The more we learn about what it takes to be a professional in something, the more our right-brain tries to stop us. So I thought I should just trust my left-brain to just do whatever tasks my eyes and brain remind me to do, and it's been working great. Feels liberating.
But here's the point of what I wanted to say. HEre's how you can tell when you're in the perfectionism zone.
It's when you constantly notice people nitpicking you, and you actually realize that it is happening, and you point it out. All three things happen.
Lets go over them each one.
First, I said nitpcking, not just someone actually giving true, very useful differences. For example, I wrote spring semester instead of winter semester in the top half of this comment. Since I'm ignoring stupid spelling and minor grammar errors for now (Something I never do, if you read my other posts) to prove a point, I still changed spring to winter because that was a genuine thing that was a problem or a bug with the comment. I also just now rearranged some wording a few sentences prior, where i moved the parenthesis--because it was confusing. I didn't care that thew ord Something was capitalized for on reason. But a big grammar mistake, sure that's importnat to fix because it means hte reader has to read over three times to understand, but itf its just a spelling mistake, then its okay.
So what I notice happening is that people are constantly nitpicking by saying things that were clearly not thought out, either jokes or trying to show how smart they are by saying do x , y or z. In all those cases, they were not actual useful feedback, but just a way for a person to feel like they're contributing or smart. So that stuff you can ignore. The point is that when ur not a perfectionist, as I am not right now, then you notice this.
Number two, you point it out, like I said. You feel comfortable expressing confusion (what an idiot the person is for suggesting somethign that is the same thing but said off the cuff, what a waste of my time, if it's insulting), or SUnday and today, there was a girl who just would not stop nitpicking or be quiet. SO I would tell her she was controlling and annoying and I Just said it straight up. She literally would not stop 4 or 5 times in both cases to keep making some nitpicking in something, giving wilder and crazier things.
ANd the last thing would be of course to realize it's happening, which most people don't. THere's notnhing more freeing than to know that what you juts did is of value and easy to understand, and if there's one or 400 spelling errosr its okay. Of course in this case im overdoingit. And the flow of text is easy to follow, as I fixed any big mistakes. But I am not modifying things because of being insecure or worried, any changes I made were because something I wrote, if I left it like that, would be tought to parse. So I hope this helps and of course I"m not going to sepnd 1 hour (seriously, thats what I do sometimes) fixing a post.