Perfectionism will tell you, “If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.” And when we leave the idea of “right” undefined, it tends to get complicated, usually in one of two ways. In the first kind of noble obstacle, perfectionism sneakily tells you that you cannot move toward your goal until you do something else: “I can’t do X until Y.” In the second kind, perfectionism tells you that reaching your goal could actually produce bad results or make you a bad person.

