An Incomplete Treatment of Perfectionism

On a walk recently, my friend claimed to have no vices.

“None?! Ice cream? Coffee?”

Nothing… “Well, I’m a perfectionist. And I waste a lot of time being one.”

The next day she emailed me saying she was happy to have named her vice. I was happy she had one. And having battled perfectionism the summer prior, I went through my archives and found an old note titled “The 90% rule can cure perfectionism” dated June 2013.

At the bottom I had written this to myself:

(Doesn’t feel complete. Research Buddhist jhanas and incorporate into article. Edit and post first blog post by tomorrow.)

And that was it. No trace of what happened to the author. He most likely vanished amongst the deep-linked passages of Wikipedia searching for the unifying theory of perfectionism.

To atone for this irony, and to help a friend, here is my decisively incomplete list on dealing with perfectionism (you will notice no mention of any jhanas).

What Science Has to Say on Perfectionism

Researchers have been predominately interested in two questions: how does a perfectionistic disposition (a) affect mental health or (b) performance?

For decades researchers disagreed: their studies came to differing conclusions. Then in the ’90s, they adopted a bifurcated view, dividing perfectionism along two behavioral axes: (a) **striving** for perfection and (b) **being concerned** about their imperfection — predominately how others perceived them.

Three groups emerged from this two-dimensional model:

1. health perfectionists: those who exhibited strivings but not concern
2. unhealthy perfectionists: those who exhibited both strivings and concerns
3. non-perfectionists

The healthy perfectionists performed best in all but a couple studies. Further they tended to enjoy themselves after working on or towards a goal. Unhealthy perfectionists did outperform their non-perfectionist counterparts but at a cost: they were more likely to be neurotic, anxious, and depressed. Either group’s superior results was completely mediated by the time they invested in that activity. Otherwise said, during tasks with time constraints, everyone did similarly.

What can we glean from this?

For one, there’s no reason to hold onto your perfectionist concerns. They don’t help you perform and they’re driving you mad. But! You can keep striving for perfectionism, so long as your strivings don’t originate from your concerns.

For instance, when you are working on your 8th draft of a budget proposal, what is motivating you? If it feels like creative inspiration, go for it! But if you’re obsessing over your office reputation, you’re not only hurting yourself mentally, but you’re underperforming your better self.

But reputation isn’t the only mark of an unhealthy perfectionist. Often we simply become unwilling to part with our striving. The healthy perfectionist strives for the ideal, but at some point she must cleave her work this image so that it can take form.

“You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in– It’s actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is.” — David Foster Wallace

The Litmus Test

In many forms of Zen, monks will strive to be carry out certain daily tasks with perfect precision, whether its entering the zendo or pouring out a cup of tea for one another. But the practice is done precisely because perfection is unattainable. In the Buddhist tradition, as a monk, you vow to attain many unattainable tasks: saving countless beings from suffering, piercing infinite gates of truth…

Their practice seeks the ideal with the complete realization that it is unattainable. They practice in order to fall short of their ideal. (These Zen monks have been practicing the two-dimensional model of perfectionism that researchers have only adopted since the 1990s.)

How can you tell if your perfectionism is healthy? When while striving you have the full expectation of falling short, then you know your strivings aren’t rooted in concerns.

How 90% > 100%

I had the stereotypical track coach in high school. The one that makes you do “all the push-ups you can do plus one.” Nothing thrilled our hormonal competitiveness more than giving the sport our 110%. That was the surefire path from 2A middle America varsity to Olympic medalling.

Except that sports psychologist and Olympian trainer Robert Kriegel coaches his athletes to run at 90%. And when they do for the first time, they often outperform their personal records.

Perhaps the stress of giving “110%” is unnecessarily fatiguing, and at 90% you’re already perfectly adrenalized. And if stress is bad for sports, it’s worse for higher cognitive functions.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) fires wildly as it tries to close the gap between your current state and your lofty aspirations. But as deadlines approach and you demand more from your mind, a stress response kicks in.

Pistons in a diesel engine create pressure during the compression stroke. A small amount of fuel is ignited by this pressure causing the pistol to fire back down the cylinder.

The perfectionist’s brain works in a similar way. As she aspires to realize her vision, mental resources flow to her prefrontal cortex (PFC). As her deadline approaches and she demands increasingly more from herself, her stress response kicks in. Her amygdala sends out a distress signal to her hypothalamus which pumps adrenaline into her blood.

You’ve probably felt this before while working on a late night project. Staring at a blank word document you realize you have absolutely no way of getting your task done in time. And then your body heats up and your heart rate surges. Your body is preparing itself. Not to write this paper, but to save its life from a perceived threat. It’s doing what it was supposed to do…200,000 years ago.

Write Your Preface

Before I starting any project, write a preface stating your scope and aims. I use the following template.

From:
To:
Subject & Scope:
Why:

It reminds me of an email header. Since I’m already habituated to writing emails, I find it natural to write this short-form preface at the top of any project.

For instance, my preface was:

From: a recovering perfectionist
To: a friend who just identified herself as one (and other like her)
Subject & Scope: an incomprehensive list on dealing with perfectionism; perhaps 4 to 6 pieces. (Timebox my research at 30mins.)
Why: because the ideas that helped me — and that could help others — aren’t all in one place; because I’ve been somewhat successful at beating perfectionism and should see for myself.

• From: You’ll notice I’m not a tenured professor sharing my seminal work on procrastination theory.
• To: You’ll notice it’s someone who can actually benefit. By remembering your reader you can avoid self-congratulatory work.
• Subject & Scope: God forbid I start reading about Buddhist jhanas.
• Why: why is it worth doing? And ‘for the sake of itself’ is a fine answer.

Commit to the Ugly Mess

In March of 2009 two guys, Bre x and K, wrote down 13 rules on how to get stuff done. They called it *The Done Manifesto.*[2] It went viral. It was picked up by other blogs including Life Hacker and Fast Company. An artist’s depiction of the manifesto also went viral, and was eventually sold as a poster[3].

Most appropriately, the Done Manifesto was written in 20 minutes “because that’s all [they] had.”

Their second rule is my favorite:

Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

And get your draft done. Imagine yourself as an artist painting a bucolic dirt road running strait to the horizon. You make a quick pencil sketch. Then you trace over your lines with more details before picking up the paintbrush. Then you take your brush and make broad strokes; then finer ones; then finer still. This is how you want to approach your work. Completion should come at the beginning. Put a full sketch in place so you can add to it over and over again.

Contrast this to how you might normally approach projects: you decide to review a book on color theory and another on landscapes. You wonder if you should read Grapes of Wrath to put yourself in the right state of mind. Then you go about painting it inch by inch insisting the hay bells be perfect cylinders before you’d even touch the road.

Here is the key to being prolific:

1. Make a mess
2. Clean it up (before your mess rots: one week is the limit).

This works with most fields:

• *Writing Anything:* (1) free write a whole chapter without, (2) then go back and edit repeatedly

“Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it…Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.” — Neil Gaimen

• *Building Startups:* (1) build a prototype, a landing page, or just pick up a phone and pitch a non-existent product, (b) if successful, build that product.

“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” — Mark Zuckerberg

• *Finding Love:* (1) be yourself, talk to strangers, (b) when someone tolerates you, invest in them.

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.” — Brené Brown

Keep Making Messes

Most perfectionists want to be great. (It’s what keeps them from committing to reality anything that wouldn’t have come from their ideal self.) But if you want to be great, one ugly mess won’t cut it. You have to keep making them — perhaps for years — before you break through.

You can’t get around the mess-making era of your life. Ira Glass, the host of this American Life, explains very simply that “for the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good.”

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

We resist creating mediocre work. We don’t want to be defined by or judged for producing it when we know we’re so much more capable. But because of this resistance, we’re constantly facing the chasm of having produced very little work at all.

“Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don’t know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, ‘You can’t do a thing’.”

Quantity is Quality

Before you know it, your messes will out-compete your original perfectionistic work *qualitatively*. An anecdote from the book “Art & Fear” reinforces this point:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Author and designer Tom Wujec hosts team building exercises. During them, each team is instructed to build the tallest structure they can out of spaghetti noodles, a yard of tape, and marshmallows. He’s done this experiment with CEOs, Kindergartners, Architects & Engineers, Business School Grads, and Lawyers.

Not surprisingly Architects & Engineers outperform all other groups. But can you guess which group comes in 2nd?

Kindergartners consistently outperform CEOs and Lawyers, and they about double the performance of Business School Grads who come in last.

The key to the Kindergartners success, Tom explains, is experimentation. They immediately jump in and start building, marshmallow and all. The business minds spend a good chunk of it deciding on team structure and planning. When they do start building they leave the marshmallow till the end and gingerly place it on top, hoping it all won’t come crumbling down.

5 year old outperform CEOs! Because they iterate. They make a messes.