Forget Perfectionism. Strive for Excellence

For a long time, I thought that striving for perfection is rewarding and meaningful. However, I understand now that it is rather detrimental than valuable. Perfection is mistaken for excellence. What is the difference and how can shift our focus to achieve excellence instead?

Downsides of Perfectionism

I noticed that perfectionism can cause disappointment, anxiety, fear, and self-defense. After a reflection on my past professional and personal experience, it became clear that those negative feelings do not serve my initial goal for perfectionism: become a better version of myself. I used to be obsessed with details, order, and sterility. Something’s wrong if I continually feel these negative emotions while having a goal of progress in my mind. Quick research showed that I was wrong about the means of improving myself. Instead of striving for perfection, I should have focused on excellence. Perfection is tied to your self-esteem, while excellence drives your behavior.

Common Symptoms

Looking back, I remember multiple times when I felt disappointed when someone would judge my work, when I felt protective, when I did not work on an idea because I thought it’s not achievable. I could not find the source for those emotions. My reasoning was that the world does not understand me and value the work I do. It turns out, my goals and the means of achieving them were wrong. If the following symptoms resonate with you, it can be partially due to perfectionism.

Crave for approval

• Perfectionism can be a way for you to get approval. Focusing on details make you think that your work has higher chances to be approved. I often feel that my work is not good enough and, therefore, I am fixated on perfection as a means to gain respect or appreciation.

Feedback makes you defensive

• The struggle for perfection makes you invested in the work. The expectation of approval makes you vulnerable. You think that investing a lot of effort will help you avoid criticism or increase the chances of approval. Thus, critical feedback makes you defensive rather than open to new ideas.

Critical to others

• You think that others should also strive for perfection. Focusing on the perfection of others makes you critical and hinders you from seeing the bright side.

Open-mindedness

• You see the journey as a straight line. It is hard to be open and see other possibilities. Due to high investment in the process, it is extremely difficult to give up on an idea, even if you know there are better options.

Procrastination due to All or Nothing mentality

• Perfection makes you procrastinate and spend time and effort on meaningless things. Once you think that the perfect result is not possible, then you might think why bother at all? That stems from the fear of judgment, criticism, and approval. When I think that I cannot do something perfectly, it hinders me from finding another non-perfect, but an optimal solution.

Feeling guilt

• Guilt always wants to remind you that you did not achieve perfection, reinforce the feeling, and make you feel guilty again. It creates an unbreakable cycle. Feel guilt → Strife for perfectionism → Realize that it’s not possible → Feel guilt again.

All of the above resonated with me in some form and explained reactions to certain events. Let’s see how we can shift our focus from perfectionism to healthy strife for excellence.

Healthy Excellence

Perfectionism is focused on fulfilling the abovementioned psychological cravings, such as seek for approval. It is fixated on appearance and other’s opinions. Excellence, on the other hand, is about the reasons and the results for the task.

The initial goals of perfectionism and excellence are different. The former sets an impossible goal and lead to disappointment and drain your energy. The latter makes you focused on what matters and rewards you with improvement.

For instance, when you start learning a new skill, focusing on incremental improvement from repetition to repetition can make you better in the long run. My drawing professor, one of the most intelligent persons I knew, used to say that perfection is a never-ending process. I cannot make my drawing perfect, I can only improve it in an attempt to reach perfection. Instead of focusing on the perfection of one drawing, I should focus on improving my drawing skills. It is different in a way that with my current skills I cannot make it perfect. When I look back at my previous works I can almost always see what can be improved. It says that I make progress over time, which is a good sign. Practicing and repetitions are more important for experience and skills than fixating on one and trying to make it perfect. You can do it as best as you can, and that’s the difference between excellence and perfectionism. Striving for the former makes you focus on improving yourself, while the latter makes you highly invested and vulnerable. A simple question “Is what I am doing adds value or matters to the goal” can help you to guide your efforts in the right direction.

I like to use Pareto’s rule to prioritize what is essential and what’s not. The principle says that 20% of your work will add 80% of the final result. The rest 80% of your time is spent on polishing the result. When I worked on the first version of this blog, I spent around 3–5 months trying to make it perfect. I oftentimes would spend days making little changes to the spacing, fonts, and hovered underlines. As the result, I invested so much time in it that I was burned out and did not even start to write content for it. Two months ago I decided to start again. In 2 days I designed the blog and started to write the content, the most important part. I spent 20% of my time to achieve 80% of the result. It was not perfect, but who cares? It was nice and it was enough. I focused on the important things. Of course, during the last two months, I altered the design adding small changes based on the feedback and experience. Making incremental improvements is more valuable than fixating on the design at the beginning and not achieving the main goal. The speed of completion makes it more fun. Instead of a never-ending process, I can see the result and have a small reward to keep me going.

Summary

This isn’t a perfect article about perfectionism and the good thing, I didn’t aim for it. Instead, my goal was to figure out why I always used to feel those negative emotions during my work and personal tasks and shift my focus from perfectionism to excellence. And, of course, to share it with you and give you food for thoughts.

Originally published at https://www.maray.ai.