Have you ever found yourself saying proudly: “I am such a perfectionist!”? If you did, read on to find out why this is the worst thing you can do to yourself. In this post, I will explain why perfectionism is evil and detrimental, how it works, and what to do with it – through my personal story which started after I read the book by Stephen Guise about “How to be an imperfectionist.” Onward to my imperfect narration!
“There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness.”
Shannon L. Alder
How it all started
Imagine that you open your browser, enter and search “perfectionism”. What do you expect to see? Chances are, you could imagine seeing some articles, blog posts or videos that praise perfectionists as hard and determined workers and the concept itself as a standard of producing a high-quality product.
Now go ahead and actually search this term in your browser. What do you see?
Here’s is what I saw:
Epidemic, disease, the dark side, problem, … Not quite as positive as one could expect. So why is that?
Well, for one thing, we live in the culture where perfectionism is ingrained in many aspects of our life. Earn that gold star as a kid; get every problem right to earn an A; keep your GPA at 4.0 to get into a prestigious university program; be a good daughter; be in perfect physical shape; maintain a superficially happy image of yourself on social media… We are taught to be perfectionistic for years. This was also true for me as someone raised overseas in a Russian culture.
And yet, when I started learning 3D modeling and programming (far from my degrees in Linguistics and Educational Psychology), I found myself putting things off for weeks even though I truly enjoy them. I had this perfect image of the result – but it was oftentimes unreachable; all too often I couldn’t reproduce a reference picture or build a specific model because I knew it would take hours and reaching that perfection seemed impossible. With programming, the sheer amount of information to be learned made me just sit there dreaming that one day I will be a perfect programmer. Obviously, this did not get me anywhere close to actually gaining these skills.
Why I decided to pick up the book
Originally, when I was formulating my goals for this project, I didn’t actually realize that my perfectionism was to blame. I simply wanted to spare more time for working on my 3D modeling and programming skills. But I also knew that I have a problem with perfectionism sometimes, so it might be a good opportunity to deal with this. And so for my project I picked the book by Stephen Guise “How to be an imperfectionist”. But then, the most amazing thing happened – in every paragraph describing perfectionists and their problems I saw a reflection of myself and my struggles – including my struggles with the skills of interest. I thought I had been steering clear of putting an effort into modeling and programming because they were very complex and overwhelming. In reality, I discovered that I was a paralyzed perfectionist who prefers not to take risks and play it safe; I was plagued by an intense fear of failure, unrealistic expectations, and bad goal-setting. Suddenly, I was able to change my course of action and to do things I hadn’t deemed possible before.
Why perfectionism is not so perfect after all
The change started with understanding the mechanism of perfectionism inner workings and its potential harm. Here are 3 major ideas that changed my perception of perfectionism.
First, perfectionism can be manifested in one or several aspects, including quantity (usually strictly predetermined), quality (usually set to “perfect”), and context (usually equals “ideal moment”).
Here are a few simple examples that I discovered in my own experience:
[1] I must spend at least 4-5 hours learning programming; any less than that is a failure (quantity);
[2] Any 3D scene I create must look perfect and identical to the reference used (quality);
[3] I’ll do some modeling and programming when I’m not as tired/feel motivated/have a more powerful PC (context).
The worst-case scenario for me was the combination of all three at the same time. However, the most single powerful aspect one for me was always quality: models too beautiful to build, theory of programming to comprehensive to learn it well in one go. Such thoughts made me give up.
Second, perfectionism is actually a protective psychological strategy. When we really love or desire something, we fear failing at it. Most importantly, we fear not the consequences of the failure but the very fact of failing and not getting that which we long for. Perfectionism keeps us safe; it’s like a small creature sitting on our shoulder whispering: “Hey, do you like how great it feels to achieve the desired result? Now, what if you go out there and blunder, and lose it all? You see, if you don’t take the risks of exposing yourself and your actions to the world, you can’t fail. You can’t get embarrassed. You can keep wallow in your illusionary greatness for as long as you want”.
9 out of 10 times perfectionism is about fear of failure. But action without failure is impossible; therefore, if we allow this fear to taker the wheel and steer, we won’t move anywhere, won’t progress, won’t grow. Perfectionisms protects us from embarrassments – but it also denies us a chance to be seen.
Finally, Stephen Guise advocated for action over motivation. According to him, action prompts more action, but motivation is too unstable to rely on because it is linked to emotions. We should always start where we are and go from there taking baby steps to achieve our goal. This idea liberated me from the feeling of “having” to be motivated to do something and proved to be one of the most effective pieces of advice in the book.
How this book changed everything
As I moved to the practical section of the book, I found that among many strategies the author described, three of them stood out to me the most, and I started making a positive change based on them. They are related to three causes of perfectionism mentioned in the book and three corresponding strategies. Below, I will illustrate each of them by my personal examples.
Cause of perfectionism: unrealistic expectations
Solution: Using the binary success definition
Unrealistic expectations refer to setting the bar too high. We have general expectations about our life in general and specific expectations – about specific actions we want to perform. If all of our expectations are too high, we are bound to hold back from taking action because focusing on small specific perfectionistic goals will obfuscate the larger goals and aspirations. Therefore, the author recommends setting high general expectations (“I am confident that I can grow and progress in this area”) but low specific expectations. The latter can be done by defining success as binary. Instead of saying “If I do something perfectly/with X percent of accuracy/ for X minutes”, this would be saying “If I do it, I succeed; If not, I fail”.
Let me illustrate this with my own example. In relation to my goals, I set very high specific expectations and defined success qualitatively: “If I finish this model by tonight, I will succeed; If the model looks very realistic, I will succeed; If I learn everything about objects in JavaScript tonight, I will succeed”. These were impossible to achieve, and they were daunting. Instead, I decided that I will be successful if I just work on anything related to my goals for 30 minutes. Worked for 30 minutes? Success. It didn’t even matter what the result was – I just wanted to do something related to my goals, and 30 minutes seemed manageable enough.
In the picture below you can see how I tracked my binary success. I created a table where I tracked whether I met the 30 min requirement and how much I actually worked that day – including my progress on the material and any distractions I had (I could have tracked only the 30-minute mark but I decided to expand as I also wanted to see my growth). There were only few days when I actually worked only for 30 minutes – I almost always kept working for at least 2 hours. I tracked this progress for a month and this trend persisted throughout the whole month. In other words, this strategy worked out great!
Cause of procrastination: circumstantial (vs. procedural) thinking
Solution: Think one step at a time
Although not listed as the official cause of perfectionism, I found that it was affecting my goals because I always planned ahead – in a bad way. For any modeling project, I always thought about all of the steps I have to take to finish it, which might include one or two weeks of hard work. The same was true for programming. This paralyzed me because I was looking too far ahead. What I decided to do instead was to always think one step at a time. As you can see in the picture below, I broke down all the programming topics I needed to learn into smaller topics linked to specific pages and checked them off when I finished them. This gave me a better sense of progress because I wasn’t measuring it in terms of the big picture – I saw my progress through smaller parts, and it kept me going. This strategy was harder to implement in some of my modeling project because I didn’t always know all the steps I needed to take – so I learned to focus on 1 problem at a time, and it worked really well.
Cause of procrastination: Concern over mistakes
Solution: Redefine success as progress, not a one-time thing
This strategy is related to the first one I described – it also has to do with lowering the expectations. However, it’s rooted in the fear of showing one’s mistakes and being judged and criticized. Big success is often linked to some great achievements that you show off to others and everybody goes: “Wow!”. It is also usually viewed as a one-time thing, a point in time that appears and disappears. Well, the truth is, not all success will be great, and the major success that you can constantly have in your life is growth. Growth can be hard to see or show to others sometimes, but if you redefine success as progress, you will stop worrying so much about making mistakes because progress is not possible without it.
For me, a huge problem used to be showing modeling/programming progress even to friends and family and taking pride in what I’ve achieved so far and where I’m going. I could always find mistakes in my work, or it wasn’t impressive enough. So I decided to redefine my success as growing and accept my imperfect works as milestones in the progress. The pictures below show what I’ve done within a month framework in modeling, and even though they don’t look fantastic, I know how much I’ve grown while working on them, and I continue developing other projects using the knowledge I gained. The other picture below shows my progress in solving programming challenges in JavaScript. Even though I am still working with lower-level problems, I am proud of independently tackling them and seeing my progress to higher levels.
Final words
Overall, “How to be an imperfectionist” helped me a lot. I learned how to stop being in perfectionist in things that really matter to me – without being too hard on myself because the author explained so well how perfectionism works and why it is harmful. I also learned through working on my goals that I am capable to do awesome things when I am not held back by high expectations, fear of failure and over-focusing on the big picture. I think this book changed the way I approach my goals and will keep helping me grow and develop in the future.
If you could relate to anything you’ve read so far in this post, you will likely find this book helpful for your own goals too. If you feel like your perfectionism holds you back, I highly recommend you to read this book and implement the strategies that resonate with you. That might be one of the most impactful books you ever read.