The Imperfect Path to Greatness
An ever-increasing trend in the world of optimization is striving to be perfect.
You often see this advice online: Never drink coffee. Always do an exacting workout. Get that 100% sleep score. Don’t have the Fritos or Oreos because you need to eat clean. Perfectionism is worn as a badge of honor, a show of one’s dedication to the pursuit of health or performance. But if you peel back the layers, a blinding obsession with being perfect doesn’t help health or performance. It almost certainly gets in the way.
Perfectionism is a mask. It’s a way to deal with a lack of control. The person who is afraid of their mortality becomes obsessed with all of the longevity trappings to an extreme degree. The person who ties their entire identity to being an athlete transforms into a neurotic mess who will do nothing that could possibly hurt their performance. The anxiety drives the compulsion. It’s a way to cope with the uncertainty and fragility that accompanies striving for something that means a lot to you—and potentially falling short.
These fears are common. I may not be good enough, or I have limitations, or I am mortal, or I could fail are all frightening confrontations. Convincing ourselves that we can be perfect and therefore eliminate uncertainty gives us some comfort that we can control the outcomes, even when that is almost always an illusion.
You see this most clearly in extremes: eating disorders, OCD, and clinical anxiety. The control temporarily eases one’s symptoms, only to make things worse in the long run. But these patterns are not exclusive to the extremes: they affect nearly everyone in day-to-day life, and have big implications for performance. The best athletes, entrepreneurs, and artists we’ve been around all have some degree of obsession. But they don’t let that tip into neurotic perfectionism and over-controlling. They have an occasional drink with friends (unless they are in recovery), sometimes stay out late, or indulge in dessert instead of eating hyper clean. They understand that it’s the totality of the work and lifestyle that matters, not any one thing. A big part of what allows the greats to stay dedicated over the long haul is the brief moments where they let their guard down and release the pressure just enough.
Trying to be perfect is a surefire path to burning bright for a day, week, or maybe even a few months. But eventually, you burn out. It’s like the Simple Plan song: I’m sorry I can’t be perfect.
What elite performers actually do is productively direct their obsession, with just enough perspective to realize what matters and what doesn’t. Those trapped in the myth of perfectionism convince themselves that never getting a bad night’s sleep or never eating Chik-Fil-A is what makes them great. Meanwhile, the best athletes know they need to show up even after a bad night’s sleep, like JJ Spaun did when he won the U.S. Open after caring for his sick daughter at 3 AM. Usain Bolt ate 1,000 McDonald’s chicken nuggets at the Olympics before performing at a level that had never been seen in history. Part of what makes great performers great is an ability to focus deeply on what makes the most difference, while simultaneously letting go of what’s not make-or-break. We’re not saying wake up at 3 AM or binge on McDonald’s! But we are saying you don’t have to be perfect.
Don’t major in the minors. Keep the main things the main things.
If you keep telling your brain that every single little thing is life or death, that a cookie could ruin your diet and disrupt your health, then your brain receives a very clear message. It learns to be on high alert, predicting disaster if the slightest deviation from your plan occurs. It’s the athlete who lost the game before it even started because they couldn’t sleep well the night before. Or the longevity influencer who can’t stop ruminating over the chocolate they had at dinner—it’s not the piece of chocolate that’s making them feel sick, it’s their obsessive perfectionism and anxiety! They’ve trained themselves to think that one slip-up is the end of the world, and their brain complies.
Nothing like a longevity influencer freaking out about having a Nutri-Grain before bed!Walking around saying you never consume sugar, always sleep 9 hours a night, etc., seems like dedication. It makes you feel good—you tell yourself you are so dedicated that you are leaving no stone unturned.
Many equate themselves to the cycling team that popularized “marginal gains,” obsessing over the team’s pillows and mattresses to optimize sleep, measuring the distance the riders walked to their bikes, and optimizing every single small detail. It’s a good story. But more often than not, it leaves you fragile and insecure. There’s a reason the team that popularized marginal gains was, in reality, part of a doping scandal. It wasn’t the marginal gains that made the difference. It was the maximal ones. They kept the main things the main things—only in their case, the main things were cheating with drugs that worked!
It’s no different than the influencers online telling you that the key to their performance is such-and-such special tea, supplement, or sleep protocol when in reality they are doping, plagiarizing, air-brushing their images, staging their lives, lying about their profit margin, and on and on and on. It’s a grift that is as old as time.
Make no mistake: if you want to be your best, you need habits and systems. You need to control the controllables. But you also need to let go of the uncontrollables, to not cling so tightly to every little thing that your entire sense of stability crumbles under the weight of your own perfection.
A much better aspiration is to be like the elite performers we know who play the long game. Those who are actually excellent. (And who don’t cheat!) They live a healthy and sustainable lifestyle. They aren’t thrown off by whatever wrench life throws their way, because they’ve learned they can still show up and do the work, even in imperfect conditions, be it a baby waking them up in the middle of the night, limited food options in a foreign country, or just the need to chill out for a while.
Perfectionism trains our brains to freak out. Real performance is about training our brains to be flexible enough. Because inevitably life will get in the way. When it does, we can either spiral or we can realize that we’re okay and find a way through. Every day, we get a choice as to what route we’ll practice.
Be good. Control what you can. But don’t fall for the trap of thinking that perfectionism is making you strong when, in fact, it’s making you fragile.
— Steve and Brad
The post The Imperfect Path to Greatness first appeared on The Growth Equation.
