Perfectionism as an Ideal
From an early age, we are taught that perfection is a virtue. Some say that “To be perfect is to be divine.” Even though we know we can never be perfect, we are expected to reach for it. Governments and employers encourage perfection, as workers striving for perfect results would do better work than those without such aspirations. What’s wrong with trying harder, doing the best we can? Wouldn’t going for perfection lead to higher quality results?
The concept of “perfectionism” is full of flaws; it isn’t about doing your best; it’s about doing better than your best. Concern with perfection means you will never be satisfied with a job well done; you will always have a nagging feeling that there was something else you could have done better. Sadly, there is truth to that; there is always something more you could have done to make something more perfect.
As you develop experience, you draw more distinctions and develop better methods. However, obsessing about “being perfect” brings about a state where you get less work done, you do it slower, and ironically, with far less quality.
What Perfectionism Really Is
Perfectionism is an illusion. It is a mental construct of an idealized result, one where a better result cannot happen. “More than Perfect” is an illogical statement, like 110%. If you define perfect as the best there is, and something turns out to be better than the best; then there must have been something wrong with your first version of “best.” Perfectionism is an expectation. When something exceeds expectations, the bar of “perfect” is set a little higher. Therein lies the logical problem. If the bar of perfection is subject to change, it isn’t really perfect, nor ever was.
So where do our original ideas of perfection come from? Human beings are tribal creatures. Our social interactions determine a large part of our psychological makeup. We adopt language, values, beliefs, basic understandings, and personal standards from our family, friends, and society.
Our concept of “perfect” is based on the results others have achieved or are trying to achieve. Whenever we encounter results that are exceptional, or exceed our expectations, they become our new ideal. They also become our target goals for our own personal efforts. Sooner or later you will realize that those perfect results are impossible with your current skills and resources. Comparing yourself against others is a sure-fire formula for depression.
The “Karate Kid” Phenomenon
There was a popular movie in the 80s called the “Karate Kid.” It was about a teenage boy entering a new school and fell in love with a cute girl. Unfortunately, she had a jealous, domineering, bully of a boyfriend who beats and humiliates the kid. The Kid, being very much in love with the girl found an old master who teaches him the “secret art” of kung-fu. The movie concludes at a martial arts competition where the kid used his new found power to knock out the evil boyfriend and won back the girl. While it is obviously a work of fiction, it exerted a powerful influence on people’s thinking.
Real martial artists despise “Karate Kid.” The idea that excellence comes from some secret trick (like a magical crane kick) belittles the commitment of daily practice real martial arts requires. The movie suggests that if you have enough force of will, and believe in yourself, you can become a black belt master in two weeks. Like so many other skills, Martial Arts is an art form. “Time and Practice” are the currencies we pay to master a skill. Suggesting otherwise insult those who pay the price.
It also feeds into the popular myth of instant gratification. Everyone wants to be a “Bruce Lee,” who developed the one inch punch to a supernatural level. Yet, somehow they ignore the fact that Bruce Lee worked out every day for hours at a time.
Every week our dojo had a new batch of Karate Kids signing up. They came in waves, would last for about a month, then wash out because they started to realize it would take longer than two weeks to become a black belt. This is the unrealistic expectation of perfectionism. They weren’t perfect “right now” so they thought it would never happen. “Oh well, guess martial arts isn’t for me, better quit…”
Advanced students had neither specialized knowledge, nor great willpower. Their great secret was simple… They loved martial arts. They enjoyed the class for the sake of the class itself. Many of these advanced students went on to start their own schools.
Reality Distortion and your Amazing Brain
Before we talk about perfection as reality distortion, we should start with the understanding that all reality is distorted. The world that we experience is one that has been filtered through our biological senses, translated into neural impulses, and sent to the brain. There it is organized, interpreted, and made sense of. All the new data is cross-referenced against all the information we have collected up to this point. Beliefs, values, and personality filter what we attend to and what we ignore, often these are more important than how well our sensory organs function.
When you stop to consider what our brain and mind actually do, it is hard not to be awestruck at the simple act of perception.
Your brain can do these incredible feats of computation, in real time, because your biological brain possesses computational power light years ahead of anything the top super computers are capable of. One of the fastest super computers in the world is the Tianhe-2 in Guangzhou, China, with a maximum processing speed of 54.902 petaflops. A petaflop is a quadrillion (one thousand trillion) floating point calculations per second. While very impressive, experts estimate that your brain is operating somewhere around 1 exaflop, or a billion-billion calculations per second. Your brain is several orders of magnitude faster than Tianhe-2. In 2014, a research team in Japan used the K Computer (the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world) to match the processing power in one second from one percent of the human brain. It took 40 minutes to crunch the calculations that 1% of your brain manages in a single second.
“Cyber Punk” is a sub-genre of science fiction that plays with the theme of how human bodies can be upgraded with technology to grant super powers. The real computational power of your biological brain is fantastically more powerful than current and foreseeable computer technology. When you understand the scope and power of the brain you are born with, cybernetic enhancement makes as much sense as installing an eight track cassette player into your skull.
At one point 8-track was cool, now it isn’t. Computer technology is impressive and it is progressing, however your brain had a 4 billion year head start. The real trick is to learn the true capabilities of our mind before we fantasize about upgrading ourselves with artificial brains.
The activity of interpreting, organizing, prioritizing, and integrating billions of bits of neural information from widely disparate sensory organs is an incredibly complicated activity. Your brain is so powerful, it can perform this function without you even noticing the interface. We believe that the world we see is the world that is.
Yet two people in the exact same situation may report completely different events. How can that be? They have wired themselves differently, as a result their interpretational system distorts reality in a different way which means they can have very different experiences.
Perfectionism as Reality Distortion
Perfectionism is a special kind of reality distortion. It makes an unrealistic target seem plausible because we are placing too much faith in stories from others.
Consider a medieval archer who heard about someone in another village who shot an arrow over the moon. He was strong, young, bored, had a bow, won several archery local competitions, and had no education about the distance of celestial objects. He was also a little drunk… so why the hell not?
If anyone else could make a long shot, he was certain that he could as well. Besides, tonight the moon was unusually big, a blue moon. From his understanding the larger things were, the closer they are… and closer is easier to hit. After shooting all night, he (predictably) didn’t hit it. The next day he retrieved all of his arrows and was annoyed. He blamed the strength of his bow, too much wind, and maybe being too drunk.
The situation may seem ridiculous because, with a modern understanding of the world, you know that the moon is an unrealistic target for a bow. How about when you, like the archer, lack essential information? Can’t you also fall prey to unrealistic targets? Don’t you also blame yourself, your circumstances, or your methods?
The archer, like ourselves doesn’t blame the real culprit. “Perfection” set you up with a target that was never achievable from the start.
How Perfection Connects to Procrastination
Most people like to believe all problems they face can be solved with cookie cutter solutions. Perhaps all “How-to books” are a little guilty of a perfectionist mindset. Find the right formula, perform it the correct way, and you will get a perfect result. Recipe like methodology works in situations where you have control over all relevant variables, such as in a kitchen or science lab. Your morning coffee tastes the same from day to day because you do the same things, with the same ingredients, in the same order, and you can guarantee a similar result.
In the real world there are many uncontrolled, fluctuating variables which influence results. When a salesman negotiates a contract, there is a wider range of things that can change. Their manager could have told them they are due for a bonus because of their awesome sales in the previous quarter. Walking into a meeting feeling enthusiastic, relaxed and confident can completely alter results. It is just as possible the client may have read some negative reviews on their product and ask some questions the salesman wasn’t ready for. This could throw them off their game. While professional salesman have a method for making sales, there are many factors which change their results.
By definition an expert has been around the block a few times. They don’t rely on cookie-cutter solutions as much as feedback from direct experience. One could say the only difference between a novice and an expert is experience, but this is not exactly true.
Novices use vicarious experience; stories heard from others form their expectations, targets, and beliefs. These stories highlight spectacular successes through skill, luck, a special method, or a less definable attribute. The stories rarely talk about tedious work, many failures, and unfortunate hardships.
All experts can relate to such things, having gone through the trial of fire themselves. The novice, on the other hand, can believe in perfect results as their stories are untarnished by real-world experiences.
The Factor that makes a Difference
Were direct experience the whole story, we should expect all novices to eventually become experts. Except most novices never become experts; they quit. The difference between a novice who is doomed to wash out, and a novice who is destined to become an expert lies not in their will power, nor in their training. It lies in their attitude towards failure.
Expert Attitude
A person with an “expert attitude” never expects to be perfect on any given attempt. They may or may not get the results they were looking for, but they can always be certain their actions will lead to some results. To those with an “expert attitude” there are no real “failures” which requires you to quit. Similarly, there are no perfect “successes” which mean you no longer need to learn more. Good or bad, any result means you can learn something new, gain a new distinction, and improve the next attempt.
Mastery of any skill is only possible by being comfortable with making many, many mistakes. Talk to a true master from any discipline and you’ll find that none of them regard themselves as a “master.” Some of the greatest martial artists never seek perfection. After 30 years of refinement one (true master) told me they only felt themselves at the beginning of their study. They are forever the student who is only looking to become just a little better.
Novice Attitude
Those with a “novice attitude” are only interested in a perfect result, they don’t care about the journey to get there, they don’t want experience, nor value it. Failure is disappointment, it is sadness, it is defeat. It is to be avoided at all costs. Having a failure means more time and more money to get the idealized perfect result. Goals are going to be delayed, people depending on you are “going to be disappointed.” Failure is at best, an obstacle and at worst, an impassible barrier. Where failure guides the expert, it is only a source of aggravation to the novice. Each failure provides more evidence of the novice’s inability to get the ideal results.
On Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a form of psychological stress where the mind becomes aware that two beliefs are in conflict with each other. We have a strong belief in data given to us by our 5 physical senses (seeing is believing). It can be stressful when sensory data violates a cherished belief. It is like driving on a highway and realizing that the map you have been following for the last 5 hours has no relationship to any of the roads or landmarks you are on. You are totally lost! The more that invested you are in that belief, the more traumatic will be when it’s challenged.
Resolving cognitive dissonance isn’t about seeing reality as it is, it is about resolving a difference between what is presented and the current understanding of reality. It is often easier to distort or engineer memories than attempt to alter core beliefs.
At the beginning of this chapter, we talked about perfection as a cultural value. Perfectionism is an unrealistic standard that is constantly being compared to current (novice) performance. Being aware of a massive gap between this internal map and one’s current results leads to cognitive dissonance. As people are unwilling to change the ideal of perfectionism they are forced to blame either themselves, their methods, or their environment.
The Best of Three Bad Options
These three options are in descending order of psychic pain to the self. When you place blame on yourself for not being able to do something, it is the most painful to your self-image. Feeling inadequate, being shown to be lesser to others, and being reminded of being a loser is often so painful, people will flee from doing an activity rather than developing mastery of it.
Finding fault with your methods generally means that you were being stupid. While not as bad, it is still humbling to realize that something you thought was a good idea at the time turned out not to be, and you have to change your way of going.
The least painful option is to find that something in the external environment was acting against you. Now you can no longer be blamed, or held accountable for the bad results. This is why so many procrastinators come up with excuses which distance their ego from their lack of doing.
If you accidentally forget about your deadlines, you run out of time to do a proper job. “Lack of time” becomes an environmental condition which becomes the only reason for your substandard results.
“If only I had more time I would have done a perfect job.” As far as self-delusions go, this one is tight; you can maintain two inconsistent beliefs (in perfect results and your ability to do them), and you create a situation where you never need to prove those personal capabilities or methods. What would happen if you started early, and the job was still not perfect? How could you live with yourself then? Hip-hip-hooray for procrastination!
Why do we need to hold an idea that we have to be perfect when we only have novice skill? What’s wrong with not knowing something, or being inexperienced? Why do we believe in stupid stories of instant mastery? What is wrong with trying something and seeing what happens? Why waste time holding onto conflicting beliefs? Is procrastination nothing more than self-sabotage to support unrealistic beliefs?
Three Types of Perfectionism
Perfectionism is a major cause of procrastination and they take on 3 different forms which we will talk about in the next three chapters. They are “the one-shot wonder,” “working hard at it,” and “perfect time to start.” You may find yourself identifying with one form or another. In each chapter we have specific exercises to overcome each sub-type of perfectionism.
Don’t feel too bad when you identify a character flaw inside yourself. Your biggest problems in life are the ones you don’t know you have. Discovering a flaw may bruise your ego a little (for you become aware of imperfection) but awareness must happen before you can take steps to fix it.
