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The Truth About Perfectionism
Perfectionism for me has always been a kind of central part of what I’m struggling with, and I really think it’s important to understand it quite broadly. The classic kind of perfectionism that people think about is that sort of internal demand that the work you produce should meet a kind of perfect standard. But I think there’s perfectionism in feeling like you ought to be able to be on top of all your to dos, please everybody and never be letting anybody down, even just perfectionism in the sense of feeling perfectly confident about the things you’re doing. It is pouring all your time and your effort and your attention into trying to feel like you’ve done something perfectly instead of pouring it into doing things in the world in reality.
I think the desire to extend our control over things, both as individuals and as societies, is completely sort of excusable, forgivable, and understandable, right, because we are in this position of such extreme unpredictability. But there’s just the fact that it’s so hard, in fact, impossible, to achieve the kind of security and control we think we want. The other thing that happens with this quest for ever more control is it kind of squeezes out from life the quite hard to define or put into words, but the quality, the vividness, the vibrancy that makes it worth living. So not only if you set out on some big project of, you know, scheduling your time very, very, very strictly and accounting for every fifteen minute period or something. Not only will you probably fail and get very stressed and frustrated by failing, but even if you succeed, you’ll fail. There’ll be some lack of spontaneity to that life, to that sense of just having to carry out these instructions that you’ve given yourself that is somehow at odds with what we really value from being alive.
Embracing Imperfectionism
I think it’s almost true by definition that there can’t be one system for putting this into practice in your life, that we have to be honest about the fact that we’re talking about perspective shifts. We’re talking about a very gradual process of learning to see the world in a different way. I think of imperfectionism as the whole approach to life that takes it as a given that there will always be more to do than you’ll have time to do, that you will never bring any project or creative work into the world in a perfect state, that you’ll never fully understand what it is you’re doing when it comes to launching new projects or entering new life stages. From that acknowledgment of how inherently imperfect everything is that we’re doing as humans, you could actually unleash a lot of energy and focus because then you don’t have to keep fighting for perfectionism. You can just dive in.
So an example of this would be people often get very bogged down in the idea of trying to develop new habits. Maybe you feel that you really miss your hobby of painting or you really would have a happier experience of life if you meditated on a regular basis. So then people get very invested in the idea that every single day for the rest of their lives, they’re going to do at least half an hour of this thing, and it’s going to implicitly sort of change them into the kind of person who naturally just finds a lot of time for those activities. An imperfectionist perspective is that could be a huge distraction, this idea of this huge, daunting, intimidating project of life change. The real skill is in being able to bring yourself to just do that thing for twenty minutes today. Maybe you’ll never manage to do it again after today. But to actually be willing to cross that gap from knowing what it is you want to be doing to doing a little bit of it, however haltingly, however imperfectly, with however little confidence that you’re going to get to keep on doing it. That’s where the real change is located because that’s when you’re actually spending time on the things that you know you want to spend your time on.