The Ultimate Solution to Perfectionism
Hint: It isn’t to get rid of it
I’ve got a friend who used to proudly proclaim he was a perfectionist every chance he got. He took pride in it. If something in his immediate environment wasn’t “right,” he would set out to fix it, almost reflexively. He had incredibly high standards for what he considered acceptable, both for the people around him and especially for himself. It made him good at what he did. But it could also make him kind of a jerk.
He knew he could be hard on himself, but he always said it was because he wanted to be better. And if he was hard on other people, he said he did it from a place of love. He wanted to see the people he cared about do well in life.
But there was a catch with my friend: For someone who was always prattling on about holding himself to high standards, and wanting to achieve excellence, blah, blah, blah — he actually didn’t get very much done.
He’d work on projects for months at a time without showing it to anyone because it wasn’t “done yet” — that is, it wasn’t perfect. He’d end up abandoning virtually every one of these projects, and I eventually realized it was because he’d reach a point where he realized it could never live up to what he had envisioned in his mind, which was, of course, perfection.
