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April 20 - April 30, 2025
Writing “I will not be a perfectionist” one thousand times on the proverbial chalkboard is a complete waste of your time.
You start by being honest with yourself about who you are. You admit that you’d never be satisfied with an average life—you long to excel, and you know it.
Interestingly (read: predictably), the push to curb perfectionism and be “perfectly imperfect” is directed towards women.
Like every kind of power (the power of wealth, words, beauty, love, etc.), perfectionism—if you don’t understand how to harness it correctly—will corrupt your life.
What they often question is why they can’t just enjoy relaxing “like a normal person.” What they want to know is who they are outside of what they accomplish.
The final chapter of this book answers a question every perfectionist must face: I know I’m technically free to do what I want, so why do I still feel so trapped?
Investing in a pathologized version of who you are is a profoundly unnecessary use of your energy. It’s also an excuse for you to avoid healing.
Perfectionism does not have to be a struggle. You do not have to stop being a perfectionist to be healthy.
We all sway in our readiness to step into our power—you’re allowed to sway, too. It’s okay to need more time or flatly refuse to grow.
Some gifts feel like a burden until you understand how they can serve you.
No. I want to express a lot but I’m waiting for the right time and figuring out the right way to express it.
You’ve decided you want to paint your living room. You’re given a color wheel with fifty paint options and told you need to pick a color in the next ten minutes.
I get frustrated with my indecisiveness. I wish I could allow myself to be a little more impulsive about taking clear action towards my goals.
Imagining possibilities, getting inspired, and generating ideas.
I know I have a lot more to offer (in my relationships, at work, in my community, etc.) but I can’t unleash my full potential until I take care of a few things first.
Not taking enough risks and being too indecisive.
Being disorganized, scatterbrained, or poor at following through on commitments.
When another person works to understand who I am as a person and why what matters to me matters to me.
That I lead a passionate life where I entertain as many opportunities as possible to create new projects, develop new skills, travel, grow, and continue exploring.
Procrastinator perfectionists excel at preparing, can see opportunities from a 360-degree perspective, and have good impulse control. Left unchecked, their preparative measures hit a point of diminishing returns, resulting in indecisiveness and inaction.
Messy perfectionists effortlessly push through the anxiety of new beginnings, are superstar idea generators, adapt to spontaneity well, and are naturally enthusiastic. Left unchecked, they struggle to stay focused on their goals, ultimately spreading their energy too thin to follow through on their commitments.
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. C. G. Jung
there’s no better first sentence than the one a procrastinator perfectionist imagines in her head but never actually writes down).
Perfectionists are people who consistently notice the difference between an ideal and a reality, and who strive to maintain a high degree of personal accountability.
This impulse to enhance evolves into a belief that urgently wallpapers itself on all sides of the perfectionist’s mind, including the ceiling and floor: “I need something to be different about this moment before I can be satisfied.”
I work mostly with women who can present well, who can seem completely put together when they want to seem that way, and whose problems aren’t immediately apparent to others.
Classic perfectionists tend to be extremely deliberate about the way they handle physical objects;
Highly self-disciplined, classic perfectionists are adept at presenting in a uniform way, making it difficult to take their emotional temperature.
The opposite of inauthentic, classic perfectionists operate with incredible transparency about their particular set of preferences.
In the cons corner, classic perfectionists have difficulty adjusting to schedule changes, big or small, and they tend to experience spontaneity as stressful.
Even when everything else is going exactly the way they’d choose, when a Parisian perfectionist is experiencing difficulty connecting to someone with whom they want to connect, it can all feel for naught.
On a deeper level, Parisian perfectionism is about wanting ideal connections.
Parisian perfectionists care very much about how well they perform and what others think of them, but they feel a peculiar sense of embarrassment about how much they care.
If they want to start a business, for example, Parisian perfectionists will take many steps towards that goal without the slightest utterance to anyone about what they’re doing. What if they fall on their face? Why risk sharing your dreams with people unless you’re certain they’ll come true?
Procrastinator perfectionists wait for the conditions to be perfect before starting. Dwelling in hesitation, they live alongside the void that forms within you when you don’t do the thing you most want to do.
!!!!!
The problem for these perfectionists is that starting a process taints it—now that it’s real, it can no longer be perfect. If something is perfect to them, it exists only in past memory or future ideal.
She was living her life passively instead of actively, and the part that stung Layla the most was that she felt she was the architect of her own misery. The more self-aware a procrastinator perfectionist is, the more frustrated with themselves they are.
Procrastinator perfectionists aren’t skimping on the self-esteem; they’re painfully aware of their gifts. Painfully aware, that is, because procrastinator perfectionists live in the space between knowing you have a gift you want to share (romantic love, talent, a new idea, etc.) and not feeling ready to share it.
Disconcerted by their own paralysis, procrastinator perfectionists assume that if they had more energy or discipline, they’d be able to execute, which is not the case.
The more procrastinator perfectionists tell themselves that they’re undisciplined, not passionate enough, lazy, and so on, the more they believe it.
They probably could’ve done it better if they had tried, but they didn’t allow themselves to take the risk of trying. This haunts them.
Salt on the wound? The things that irk procrastinator perfectionists the most are hints at the very things they would excel at themselves if they only gave it a shot.
As they learn to shift from a passive to an active state, they gain access to an internal power that has thus far remained elusive for them.
two winning lottery cards waiting to be scratched off by every procrastinator perfectionist in the world: It’s not mere talent that rises to the top, it’s persistence. While change does always involve loss, not changing involves a much deeper loss.
It was something adjacent to mania, the way her mind flooded with ideas about how to improve, solve, create.
The crash is inevitable because messy perfectionists contending with unmanaged perfectionism disregard natural and unavoidable resource constraints (time, money, physical energy, etc.) in enthusiastic and active pursuit of their dreams.
Messy perfectionists blatantly ignore limitations and don’t accept the notion that while you can do anything, you can’t do everything. It takes focus to bring something to completion.
Messy perfectionists possess tremendous gifts, but none of those gifts can come to fruition without focus.
Messy perfectionists don’t necessarily appear messy in their presentation or create literal messes around themselves, it’s that they try to do a million things at once in a way that (at least figuratively) piles up all over the place.
That’s what happens to messy perfectionists who don’t manage their perfectionism. They get hooked on the intoxicating rush of a fresh start, then become disillusioned by the sobering tedium required to complete the work.
