The Perfectionist
Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
Truly.
Perfectionism isn’t just a cute flaw to bring out in interviews.
It creates unnecessary suffering, wastes scarce resources, and costs real lives.
When you perfect something trivial, which is usually the case, you take your attention off of what truly matters. You rob yourself and the community of your full embodied potential.
Now, today we meet the Perfectionist. This meticulous little master takes sadistic pleasure in directing a narrow laser beam of focus on a micro-square inch of reality.
The perfectionist screens out most of reality, focusing on a small domain where an illusion of control and certainty can be maintained.
In the process the perfectionist gets lost in detail and loses out on embodiment, self-resonance, connection, and perspective. What starts out as fun and engaging ends up feeling feel driven, hollow, and joyless. Eventually the perfectionist runs out of energy or breaks down physicially or mentally.
The perfectionist doesn’t cope well with changes. It implicitly assumes that the world is stable enough to perfect something.
Unfortunately, the perfectionist inevitably ends up perfecting something trivial where there is a quick & direct feedback loop.
In doing so it neatly avoids the great problems of our time, which are messy and uncertain affairs, and where feedback is slow and imprecise.
This may be literally the worst time in history to be a perfectionist. The pace of change is accelerating toward a singularity and it is less than clear what skills AI will leave to humans.
When it comes to how best to position ourselves for the future, our ability to adapt and our cognitive flexibility are likely to outperform any specific skillset. This is the opposite of perfectionism, which always seeks to lock things in.
In the healing process:
Obviously, the perfectionist tries to perfect therapy. It is a diligent and hard worker and that usually pays off. The main task for the perfectionist is to unwind its obsessive tendency to constrain and perfect. This tendency is primarily about soothing anxiety, but it can also involve the denial of difficult realities, or a strategy to gain status or other rewards.
Avoiding uncertainty and change is at the heart of perfectionism. Therefore, the perfectionist must actively practice tolerating both uncertainty and change. There is real pain in leaving things more open and flexible. The perfectionist needs to get messy, to break patterns, to stumble in the dark, to open up new fronts and leave them open, and to fail repeatedly.
To work with the perfectionist:
Notice when the perfectionist takes over and learn to unblend from it to come back to your senses, or a deeper sense of the embodied self.
Challenge the vision. Is it as big and messy as it could be, or are we hiding in perfectionism?
Win ugly and launch badly! Do things at a lower standard in order to get onto the arena and get real-world feedback.
Resources:
Alan Gordon’s 28 day recovery program (aimed at this type)
