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July 2 - July 2, 2020
it tells you that good is bad;
reading two pages of a book and writing 50 words a day.
The perfectionist in me saw two strong reasons not to go to the gym. The imperfectionist in me saw an opportunity for a little bit of forward progress, and I took it. What some fail to realize is that life is composed of these small decisions.
If you don’t manage to reframe perfectionism as a damaging and inferior mindset, the illusion of its superiority will thwart your desired changes.
We make the grave error of redefining partial success as “failure.” If it isn’t whole and complete, we find it embarrassing at best and humiliating at worst. This isn’t merely irrational—it’s lethal to our progress and well-being!
Insecurity and inferiority complexes alike make you hypersensitive to your flaws.
school teaches us that “‘A’ efforts” bring “‘A’ results.” Real life shows us that “‘A’ efforts” only give us a chance at “‘A’ results.” Students can go out into the job market, do all the right things, and still get a real-life “F” when they aren’t selected for a job. This is the ideal breeding ground for perfectionistic thinking.
All negative behaviors and mindsets, including perfectionism, provide some type a benefit that draws people to them.
Most people aren’t as concerned with being praised as much as they are about preventing embarrassment. Author and researcher Brené Brown says that perfectionism is a 20-ton shield we carry around in hopes that it protects us from harm. “In truth,” she says, “what it does is keep us from being seen.”6 If you’re unseen, you can’t be embarrassed, but does anyone really want to remain unseen? Being seen and even embarrassed occasionally is an essential part of life.
We cling to perfectionism not because the cost of failure rises but because the importance of the reward rises. The more we want something, the more afraid we are to not get it. A “perfect” example of this is one of the many low-risk and high-reward behaviors that trigger a perfectionistic response in people: asking a girl to go on a date, asking for a raise, meeting new people, or trying something new. Each of these usually has a negligible downside compared to the great upside if it’s a success. Why then, would they trigger this response?
The reason we can still be fearful of these near-zero risk actions is the second component of failure—meaning and symbolism. If you fail to do something, you will naturally wonder why. Why did she say no? Why didn’t I get the raise? Am I unintelligent because I couldn’t complete a Rubik’s cube on my first or tenth try? The answer to these bigger questions is what we fear the most. Your boss said you couldn’t get a raise. Why? You might think it’s because you’re not good enough, you don’t have what it takes, and your career has hit its ceiling. Suddenly, this zero-risk attempt has thrown a
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We fear what failure means about who we are. We fear that it will expose our weaknesses and damage our vulnerable hopes and dreams. That’s scary stuff!
Perfectionism protects us against symbolic failure.
Because low-risk and high-reward opportunities are often tied to concepts that we crave success in—romance, career, and socializing—an individual instance of failure can be seen as symbolic of our standing in that area, even though, logically, it’s more of a chance-based result than a life-defining failure.
If you never attempt something, you can’t know empirically that you’re not world-class at it.
It’s important to be honest about this—perfectionism does protect us. It protects us from massively damaging our confidence and hopes. (Otherwise, it wouldn’t be so popular.) Being a perfectionist seems prudent and responsible based on this perspective.
do you want or need this type of protection?
Protection often weakens that which it protects.
Perfectionism significantly weakens us over time by making us overprotective against mistakes and failures that carry a short-term downside and a long-term upside.
Those who are paralyzed struggle the most with concern over mistakes and doubts about actions.
One study found perfectionism “to be a primary disruptive factor in the short-term treatment of depression, whether the treatment is pharmacotherapy (imipramine), cognitive-behavior therapy, interpersonal therapy, or placebo.”10 This suggests that depression may not be the condition we should be treating. Maybe we need to focus on the underlying perfectionism mindset that leads so many people to depression and suicidal thoughts.
A mindset’s merit is based on how it affects your actions and how you feel about those actions. The perfectionism mindset generally has a negative impact on both of those areas.
Striving for excellence, on its own, is wholly good. High expectations are the problem.
Perfectionists and procrastinators love TV because nobody watches TV incorrectly.
(perfectionism, not a lack of ideas, is the one and only cause of writer’s block),
So true!!!
The best results in sports and in life come from training.
There’s a term called “self-handicapping” that describes how people purposefully handicap themselves—explicitly or mentally—to have an excuse on hand if things don’t work out. When done explicitly, it might be letting someone get a head start in a race because if you give them a head start and they win, you can say it’s because they started first. If self-handicapping mentally, you may start the race from the same spot, but in your head, you’ll think, “My knee hurts and I’m tired” instead of “I’m going to win this race.”
We do this to protect ourselves.
know it’s cliché, but life is too short to play it safe. Given our natural limit of about 100 years, we have every reason to throw ourselves at the world with a good measure of (smart) reckless abandon. That’s the mark of the imperfectionist. It won’t be satisfying at the end of your life to have solid excuses for not doing all the things you wanted to do.
In life, you’re consistently building up one of two things—your level of comfort or your level of growth.
To grow in an area, you must face increased risk, uncertainty, and discomfort. There is a...
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Weight lifting breaks down muscle fiber in much the same way that we’re “broken down” when we fail or go through an uncomfortable experience.
This is not a cheap platitude; neurologically, our brains become more resilient to whatever failures and discomfort we experience regularly.
The road to excellence begins unimpressively.
We try to come up with an excuse for every stumble instead of simply accepting that we stumble sometimes and can get back up.
Self-handicapping is derived from perfectionism, and its flavor of poison is prepackaged excuses that let us live inferior lives when we could be thriving, stumbling, getting back up, and thriving again.
Because perfectionism is a habitual way of perceiving the world, change must be approached neurologically, not with “you can do it” sentiments.
for a lasting change to occur, the brain must have enough repetition over time to form new neural pathways.
Emotions motivate us to take action, but the reverse is also true: emotions follow action.
our actions greatly impact how we feel, and the effect is so powerful that it changes us even if we don’t want or mean for it to.
The Duke University journal study mentioned earlier found that emotional change was almost twice as likely to be caused by actions the study participants had taken as opposed to thoughts.24
Thoughts are tainted by the very emotions they’re attempting to eradicate, which can make emotional change a highly difficult endeavor.
it’s much easier to generate motivation by acting first. To a motivation-driven person, this seems invalid based on their flawed premise that we can’t take action if we’re not motivated to do it.
The main point here is that action itself is the best starting point for more action, while trying to think your way into more motivation is an unreliable and ineffective way to create forward momentum.
When you treat how you feel as the deciding factor of what you do, you will be a slave to it. You will try so many motivational techniques, but in the end, your results will be as unreliable as your feelings.
People who have successfully changed their lives have figured out that when you start doing something, your emotions follow suit.
Never forget this: It’s easier to change your mind and emotions by taking action than it is to change your actions by trying to think and feel differently.
The Texas study mentioned earlier found that people were notably less emotional about habitual behavior than non-habitual behavior. As a behavior is repeated, the subconscious recognizes the pattern, the neural pathway is strengthened, and our emotions toward the behavior decrease.
habits decrease emotion.
Motivation should more or less be ignored if you want your changes to last.
