Chapter 8: The Exhaustion of Perfection
The email was four sentences long, and Lena had been writing it for three hours. She was a graduate student, and the email was to her advisor. It said that she would need an extra week on her thesis chapter. It should ha
The email was four sentences long, and Lena had been writing it for three hours.
She was a graduate student, and the email was to her advisor. It said that she would need an extra week on her thesis chapter. It should have taken two minutes. But she had written it eleven times, and each version had seemed to say something wrong. Too casual. Too apologetic. Too much like an excuse. Too much like asking for special treatment. She kept imagining the advisor reading it and forming an opinion of her that she could never take back.
The irony was that the chapter was the reason she needed more time, and she had barely touched it. The opening paragraph, which she had rewritten some forty times, was still sitting at the top of an otherwise empty page. Every day she opened the document, reread the paragraph, found it wanting, and began again. In the evenings, she reformatted the bibliography. On the weekend she rearranged her notes into a new color-coded system. She was working constantly and producing almost nothing.
“If it isn’t excellent,” she told her sister, “it’s proof that I never should have been admitted.”
Her sister said, gently, “Lena, you can’t keep a draft on the page long enough to find out.”
Standards versus perfectionism
Perfectionism is often confused with having high standards, and the two are not the same. Wanting to do excellent work is healthy. Perfectionism is something more specific and more costly.
Researchers who study it have found it helpful to separate two strands. In a review of the field, the psychologists Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto distinguished perfectionistic strivings, the pursuit of very high standards, from perfectionistic concerns, which include fear of mistakes, harsh self-evaluation, and the feeling that others will judge you for imperfection. Strivings by themselves are often linked with positive outcomes. Concerns are the part that tends to go with distress, procrastination, and burnout.
The clinical psychologists Roz Shafran, Zafra Cooper, and Christopher Fairburn offered a useful definition of what they called clinical perfectionism: a state in which a person’s self-worth is judged largely by their striving for, and achievement of, demanding standards, despite negative consequences. The key phrase is self-worth. The work stops being about the work. It becomes a daily referendum on whether the person deserves to exist in the room.
Lena was not struggling with the demands of a thesis. She was struggling with what she believed an imperfect paragraph would say about her.
How perfectionism wears us out
Perfectionism seems like a fierce devotion to quality, and for a while it can look like one. But its behavior patterns tend to produce the opposite of what it wants.
Excessive checking. Rereading, re-editing, and re-verifying long after the point of benefit. The twelfth read-through of a document finds very little that the third did not.
Procrastination. If the task might reveal inadequacy, the safest course is to avoid beginning. Lena’s reformatting and color-coding were not laziness.
They were safe work, activity in the vicinity of the thesis that could not be judged as the thesis could.
All-or-nothing thinking. An outcome is either perfect or a failure. There is no category for good, with two things to improve.
Avoiding feedback. The most damaging effect of all. Learning requires showing imperfect work to someone who can respond. A perfectionist who never submits the draft is protected from criticism, and cut off from the one thing that would help.
All this has a hidden price: the harder we avoid mistakes, the fewer we allow ourselves to learn from. The things most worth doing, writing, building, speaking, loving, require the willingness to do them badly first.
Imperfect work does not reveal what we fear
Under the perfectionism, there is nearly always a prediction: If I am seen to fail, something terrible will happen. People will think less of me. I will lose my place. I will be exposed.
This is a prediction, and like any prediction, it can be tested. Most people never test it, because the whole system is designed to avoid ever finding out. But those who do try often discover something quietly astonishing: the imperfect work is received with far less fuss than they feared. A draft gets comments. A mistake gets corrected. A late email gets a reply that says, in effect, no problem.
Lena’s advisor, as it happened, replied to the four-sentence email in under a minute, with a single line: Sure, take the extra week. Looking forward to the draft.
Redefining progress
If perfectionism treats every task as a test of worth, the antidote is to treat tasks as ways of learning. A draft is not a verdict on you. It is a way of finding out what you think. A first attempt is not a failed final version. It is the material the final version will be made from.
This shift matters because it changes what we count as success. For a perfectionist, success is a flawless result. For someone who works from learning, success is a better result than last time, an honest attempt, and information about what to do next. By that measure, Lena’s paragraph was not a disaster. It was an unfinished experiment.
Try this: Define “good enough” before you begin
Perfectionism thrives on an undefined finish line. If you never decide what “done” looks like, the work can always be improved, and so it never ends. The antidote is to define “good enough” before you start, when your judgment is clearest.
- Write three criteria. What does this need to do for the task to succeed? Keep them functional. Clear request. Correct dates. Polite tone. Not flawless or impressive.
- Set a time limit. Decide how long the task deserves and set a timer. For an email, ten minutes. For a first draft, an hour. A deadline forces choices that perfectionism postpones.
- Grant yourself a rough first version. Say it out loud: This one is allowed to be bad. A rough draft is a legitimate stage, not a failure of one.
- Write the “done” sentence. Complete it: I am finished when… …it meets the three criteria and I have read it once.
- Stop and send. When the timer rings, check against your criteria, and release it. Then notice what happens. The point is to collect evidence that your fear’s predictions are usually wrong.
Lena used this for her chapter. Her criteria were: state the question, summarize three sources, and say what I will do next. She gave herself ninety minutes to write a rough first version, and she let it be rough. It was not good. It was, however, six pages longer than anything she had produced in weeks, and by Friday she had something to show her advisor. Her advisor, naturally, found things to improve. That was the point. That was what the work was for.
A realistic goal. Perfectionism rarely yields to a single technique, and the urge to polish will return. The purpose here is to collect evidence about what actually happens when you stop at good enough. Try it first on low-stakes tasks. If perfectionism is causing severe distress or affecting your health, specialist support is worth seeking.
A THOUGHT TO CARRY
Done and imperfect gives the world something to respond to. Perfect and unfinished gives it nothing.