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August 15 - August 29, 2020
Perfectionism (noun): “A disposition to regard anything short of perfection as unacceptable”1
Perfectionism makes you stay home, not take chances, and procrastinate on projects; it makes you think your life is worse than it is; it keeps you from being yourself; it stresses you out; it tells you that good is bad; and it ignores the natural way in which things work.
Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results
Book to look into
The premise of Mini Habits was ridiculous: force yourself to do (seemingly) too-small-to-matter positive behaviors, but ones you can do every day, even on your worst day.
look back over your life, and think of all the thousands of little moments in which you had an opportunity to be doing something that could have added up to mastery in an area by now. These small everyday decisions (and omissions) form the bulk of our lives.
Professor Randy Frost developed what is called the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (FMPS).
six subscales with their common abbreviations: Concern over Mistakes (CM) Personal Standards (PS) Parental Expectations (PE) Parental Criticism (PC) Doubts about Actions (DA) Organization (OR)
People abide by three types of perfect standards: context, quality, and quantity.
Nearly everyone is unknowingly trained to be perfectionists by copying the goal size of the people around them.
Protection often weakens that which it protects.
If you can withstand something undesirable AND it strengthens you, you’re far better off “unprotected” against it.
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.
The primary benefits of becoming an imperfectionist are reduced stress and greater results by taking positive action in more situations. The more fearless, confident, and free a person is, the more they embrace imperfection in their life.
In general, the idea behind imperfectionism is to not care so much about conditions or results, and care more about what you can do right now to move forward with your identity and your life.
Expectations are essentially weaker versions of self-goals, and the concept applies to them as well. Surprise bonus checks make people smile, and surprise bills upset them.
it’s best to have high general expectations (for confidence) and low specific expectations (for resilience and confidence).
Whatever you want to do more of in life—exercise, write, read, swim, dance, sing, laugh, and so on—lower the bar for doing it. If you are willing to do it in the sewer, you will never fail to do it again.
when you care less about any result of a process, it makes the process itself easier.
Perfectionists use their desire for positive results to motivate them to go through the process. Imperfectionists focus on the process and let the results take care of themselves.
Marcus’s book, Lone Survivor,
“The tricky thing about rumination is that it feels like it's helpful, but there's no action taken, and you don't move forward to some sort of solution.” ~ Carla Grayson
Rumination is a desperate, futile attempt to change the past by thinking about it. It’s a form of denial, and acceptance is the antidote.
In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey says to “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
A great substitute for “should have ___” is “could have ___.” This is the phrase of possibility. Whereas “should” evokes a sense of certainty and obligation, “could” is open-ended and free.
Why Do People Seek Approval?
1. They lack self-confidence and self-esteem, and thus look for other people to give it to them.
2. They want to be liked by everyone.
The solution for this is something I call rebellion practice, which is as fun as it sounds.
The Three-Pronged Confidence Approach
1. Chemical Confidence Building
Earlier in the book, I mentioned Cuddy’s study, which found that, after standing in a confident pose for two minutes, participants’ testosterone increased ...
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2. Faking Confidence
3. Adjusting Your Benchmark
Confidence does not actually exist as a standalone attribute.
Even general confidence is a function of how competent you believe you generally are compared to whatever standard you have in your mind.
Every confidence benchmark is arbitrary, so we may as well create our own.
The key to building powerful confidence is to decide specifically what you can be confident about right now, and build from there.
Concerning yourself over making mistakes increases your anxiety and fear of action.
If you have significant concern over making mistakes, you may have Impostor Syndrome, which could be considered a sibling of perfectionism.
If you’re successful in the eyes of the world, remember that human accomplishments are only impressive because we are all flawed (otherwise, success would be ordinary).
Action for Impostor Syndrome: Write down your accomplishments,
If you don’t tackle your underlying fears, they will always be there to sabotage you, no matter how motivated you are to succeed.
Imagine your task is to deliver a speech in front of 5,000 people. Most people would be thinking in analog terms here, because the speech could go from well to poorly or anything in between. But what if you decided that getting up on the stage and talking qualified as success? That’s it. If you get on stage and say words, you succeed.
Procrastination is not caused by laziness but by a combination of fear and overcomplicated objectives, which come from a perfectionistic mindset.
Make success easier than failure, and you’ll succeed.
Instead of expecting perfect results, the imperfectionist expects perfect progress and consistency.
If you hesitate to move to implementation even briefly, you may loop back to deliberation and get lost in the details of complex variables. Even worse, this can become habitual.
The second you understand there is a bigger benefit and less downside to doing something, do it.
we (habitually) assume that, because our brains are amazing analytical machines, we should use them for every … little … tiny … decision.
