Toxic Perfectionism
I’ve always been proud of being a perfectionist. After all, what’s wrong with continual improvement and cranking out work I’m proud of?
Then I happened upon this line from Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart that rocked my world:
“Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven. Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think?”
Genuine self-improvement asks a very different question: “How can I get better?” It requires curiosity, experimentation, seeing failures as learning opportunities and external standards as fuzzy guidelines rather than the goal itself. Whereas Perfectionism is about trying to earn praise, approval and acceptance.
She continues:
“Most perfectionists were raised being praised for achievement and performance (good grades, good manners, nice appearance, sports prowess, rule following, people pleasing).”
Holy crap - that’s me!
Suddenly my insecurities, social anxieties, and deep fear of judgment all made sense. What I thought was self-improvement was actually driven by the need to uphold a level of external polish or standard of excellence.
Although this approach led to me to become “successful” by society’s standards, it also gave me plenty of nervous breakdowns, guilt, anger-driven toxicity in relationships, and burnout at work. Tack on years of suppressed emotional needs, foregone opportunities for self-discovery, and the cost is grave indeed.
Ironically, my best works emerged when I genuinely didn’t care about others’ opinions and just wanted to do something useful in the world. Examples include pioneering tech events in the Silicon Valley, moving to London and starting YouTube. Those were the times when I felt the most alive, fully myself, and on top of the world.
The 3 Dose Cure to Perfectionism
Have you ever missed opportunities because you were afraid to put yourself out there or what you made didn’t seem good enough? In other words, you didn’t pull the trigger because you or your work wasn’t “perfect”.
This is known as Life Paralysis and is perhaps the most damaging symptom of perfectionism because it stands in the way of the ideal life we want to live.
The first dose of the cure is to remember that life is short. In Meditations, the Stoic philosopher king Marcus Aurelius reflected:
“When you are high on indignation and losing patience, remember that human life is a mere fragment of time and shortly we are all in our graves.”
I further expanded on this in “Nothing Matters” :
“When we’re overwhelmed by emotion and feel as if our actions and experiences define the world, reminding ourselves that “nothing matters” is incredibly liberating. This realization enables us to venture into the world more courageously, with less attachment to outcomes.”
Our time here is so brief that chasing after perfectionism, which is an external source of validation anyways, is not worth it.
The second dose is found in the world of art. Rick Rubin in “The Creative Act” writes:
“When you believe that the work before you is the single piece that will define you, it’s difficult to let go. The urge for perfection is overwhelming. We’re frozen and sometimes end up convincing ourselves that discarding the entire work is the only way to move forward. The only art we get to enjoy are from creators who’ve overcome these hurdles and released their work.”
“Releasing a work into the world becomes easier when we remember that each piece can never be a total reflection of us.Only the reflection of who we are in this moment. If we wait, it’s no longer today’s reflection. In a year we may be guided to create a piece that looks nothing like it. There’s a timeliness to the work. The passing of seasons could dissipate the value of the work holds for us…moments and opportunities are lost. The next works are robbed of bringing to life.”
In other words, everything we do is imperfect. Our feelings, experiences, and our very selves will differ tomorrow from today. The key is to start today and make incremental improvements, testing whether or not you enjoy what you do.
This is why I run my life in 2-week sprints . Not only does the system chunk up big ambitious projects in smaller manageable bits, it vastly reduces the startup costs and stakes, allowing me to freely explore without initial commitment to a long term goal. After all, success comes from loving the journey, not just the destination.
Finally the third dose comes from the poets. Recognize that no amount of data or logic can perfectly predict the outcome of our the deepest and most personal decisions. These are what I call “Rilke Questions” named after this passage from Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Love the questions…like books written in a foreign language. Like doors that you don’t have the keys to yet. Live the questions, so that perhaps one day you can live into the answers.”
These are the times when we need to put aside our thinking selves. There’s no point in projecting our future anxieties into the present. Some of my most rewarding experiences like starting Mind Map Nation have been the result of such leaps of faith.
Just Another Night in SF
My greatest feat of overcoming perfectionism was proposing to my wife, Olivia.
I’ve always imagined proposing to the girl of my dreams in some crazy grand adventure, like hiking to a hut in Hawaii, overlooking the mountains in ocean, and having a drone overhead while I bent down on one knee.
But then one night I was just lying next to her, and I realized that this moment felt perfect, even though we’re just in a normal apartment in the middle of San Francisco with people, buses, and fire engines buzzing outside. It was far from this grandiose vision that I’ve always had, but it felt right and that was when I asked her to marry me.
There is no perfect timing. There is just the right timing for you.
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