More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 26 - April 16, 2024
Perfectionists are not balanced people, and that’s okay. Subscribing to prepackaged notions of balance and generic wellness when they don’t fit who you are isn’t being healthy, it’s being obedient.
Interestingly (read: predictably), the push to curb perfectionism and be “perfectly imperfect” is directed towards women. Have you ever heard a man refer to himself as a “recovering perfectionist”?
Perfectionists are intelligent people who understand that everything can’t work out perfectly all the time. What they sometimes have trouble with is understanding why they still feel so disappointed by imperfection in the face of that intellectual concession. What they sometimes wonder about is why they feel so compelled to endlessly strive. What they’re sometimes confused by is what they’re striving for in the first place. 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.
Classic perfectionists are highly reliable, consistent, and detail-oriented, and they add stability to their environment. Left unchecked, they struggle to adapt to spontaneity or a change in routine, and they can experience difficulty connecting meaningfully with others.
A classic perfectionist writes the first sentence, hates it, tries her best to forget it ever existed, but is inevitably haunted by it for a minimum of eight years.
Perfectionism is the invisible language your mind thinks in, the type of perfectionism that shows up in your everyday life based on your personality is just the accent.
Come again? Messy perfectionists blatantly ignore limitations and don’t accept the notion that while you can do anything, you can’t do everything.
Perfectionists never stop noticing the gulf between reality and the ideal, and they never stop longing to actively bridge the gap.
The eclipsing is not the problem; it’s the point: to be alive and engage with life, not to sequester yourself behind portion-controlled aliveness and call it balance.
Women feel an increasing sense of liberation as they age, not because they’ve finally achieved the balance they were searching for but because they’ve finally given up on it.
Wanting more is an affront to everything you’ve learned about how to be a grateful, healthy, and balanced woman. A woman who wants more is ungrateful, a man who wants more is a visionary. A woman who seeks power is “power hungry,” a man who seeks power is an “alpha male.” These narratives are boring and raggedy. Be done.
For perfectionists, the risk of being underwhelmed is much scarier than the risk of being overwhelmed.
You don’t achieve liberation through control; you achieve liberation through acceptance.
Self-worth is about understanding that right now, with all the things you have yet to achieve, you are as worthy of all the love, joy, dignity, freedom, and connection as you would be had you already achieved them. You are worthy of all these things because you exist. Your self-worth is prearranged; you have no hand in it. From the day you were born until the day you die, you remain worthy. You’re worthy in every passing hour, through every mistake, in sun and in storm. Whether you accept or deny your worth is up to you.
Yes, you know you’re competent and smart, but do you believe you’re worthy of having a job you love?
When you’re disconnected from your self-worth, you think your ability to feel joy is won through goal attainment. I wonder if I wrote this entire book just to write this next sentence: You don’t earn your way to joy. Joy is a birthright. So is love, freedom, dignity, and connection. As the inimitable James Baldwin said, “Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is wear it.”
You may in this moment feel very connected to your self-worth, like you’re “done” learning the critical lessons. No matter how tremendously you’ve grown, you will encounter your own version of questioning your worth in a Target parking lot at some point in the future.
For classic perfectionists, it looks like refusing to acknowledge that no matter how much predictability, exterior beauty, and organization you create, some moments are uncertain in a way you can’t control.
Presence changes how judgmental, compassionate, and solution-oriented you are. Being present invites relief from living in a world where what’s missing and wrong relentlessly eclipses what’s good and already there.
Whatever you’re doing, thinking, or feeling, you seek to be present first. Some people describe this level of engagement with the present moment as being “in the zone.” Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it being “in flow.”
Punishment doesn’t work. When you punish someone, that person doesn’t learn how to change; they learn how to avoid the source of the punishment. If you are the source of your own punishment (through critical self-talk, for example), then you learn to avoid yourself by numbing out. Numbing out looks like overeating, overspending, overworking, getting caught up in drama, substance misuse, mindlessly watching TV or scrolling social media, and so forth.
To fail forward means that you allow yourself to grow from your failure, and out of that newfound state of expansion, you try again.
The bad news is that achieving a specific outcome (an award, a promotion, a relationship, etc.) is not going to make you happy. Building meaning is what makes us happy, not desultory acquisition. The worst news is that blazing through the process makes you feel worse because you put so much pressure on attaining the goal as your singular source of happiness, but hitting the goal can never make up for the fact that you were disengaged and not feeling any joy or connection the whole time you were in pursuit of it.
Instincts never lie to you. Pay attention to the messages that don’t change; those are your instincts.
You’re allowed to have a layered experience. You can be disappointed and proud. You can be curious about what might have been and grateful for what is.
Healing is a series of tiny evolutions, born from ostensibly negligible choices, carried out day after day; it’s most often expressed in moments that have no witness other than yourself. These invisible “nothing” moments are where the magic happens.
It was never the terrible things that happened to you that made you stronger; it was the resiliency-building skills you engaged to process the terrible things.
Anything that helps you operate with premium energy is productive. With premium-quality energy, you can access your abilities in a way that “burnt-out you” could never compete with.
Don’t worry about getting so lost in your leisure that you won’t return to your work. You’re a perfectionist; the drive within you to excel is compulsive, so you won’t be able to help returning to your work.
Being healthy is not a static coordinate in space that you land on, plant your flag in, and conquer. The sustained energy required to attend to your life in a consistently conscious manner (which is the way adaptive perfectionists operate) is a type of athleticism.
INSTEAD OF: How does my schedule look tomorrow? Will I have the time to meet with her? TRY: How does my schedule look tomorrow? Will I have the energy to meet with her?
The subtraction of judgment alters everything about the way you perceive a situation, including what the problem is, which solutions are available, and what you deserve.
The concept of striking when the iron is cold applies well to multiple contexts. At work, in your parenting, in your relationships, and most importantly, with yourself—don’t try to resolve the negative issue at the height of the negative issue.
Striking when the iron is cold is about consciously choosing the moment when the intervention, feedback, or appeal for connection is most likely to be received.
Just like other-forgiveness, self-forgiveness does not need to be 100 percent for you to move forward.
Trusting yourself looks like depersonalizing setbacks. Trusting yourself looks like realizing that just because the thing you felt so certain about changed, that doesn’t mean you were wrong, made a bad choice, or have faulty intuition.
