Perfectionism. Really?

My daughter caught my attention. “But I want it to be perfect.”

It was a moment of awakening. My daughter's innocent desire for perfection echoed my own inner struggle, a battle I’ve been fighting for years. The realization that this ideal of perfection was already ingrained in her young mind was a jolt. In that moment, I saw a daunting path ahead, a path I've been treading for a lifetime.

“You can forget it,” I said. “It will never happen.” 

It never will.

You see, we’ve sort of been brainwashed by it all. When I was growing up, it was instilled in me that perfectionism was a positive trait, one worth chasing because it demanded high standards and achievement, but what they didn’t tell me, and what I shared with my daughter, was the fine print, like a drug one might take (the analogy is intentional), that read all the horrible possible side effects including death (and, in the case of perfectionism, suicide is not something that hasn’t ever happened because of it – I’ve lost several creative friends to this darn drug).

So, here’s the fine print.

Knowing from personal experience, perfectionism wrecks you, mind and body. It brings chronic stress and anxiety. It produces high pressure that, most of the time, is imaginary. It exacerbates a fear of failure because you are so intent on avoiding mistakes or not meeting other’s expectations that happiness becomes the unicorn and perfectionism becomes the god.

You don’t get things done because it freakin’ makes you procrastinate anything important. You avoid tasks because you know they’ll never be good enough anyway, so why do them? It’s almost like taking the polar plunge at the park with friends in mid-February. Instead of loving what you do, you must build up to jump in. The problem is that you rarely build up. Instead of getting things done, you spend all your time planning on doing something to perfection rather than getting the messy thing down in the first place so you can maybe clean it up.

This is not productive. Ever. You spend so much time not just examining the tree instead of the forest but every gosh-darned leaf and maybe every microscopic bug on the undersides of the leaves, which you diligently turn over, every single leaf, before you can do the first thing. You spend all that time, all day long, trying to get it right only to find that the return on your investment is zilch because you haven’t done anything. It’s crazy.

Because you wasted your day on this silliness, you feel like dirt. Your self-esteem is somewhere like a dust bunny under an old sofa, you beat yourself up because you are so darn critical, you talk to yourself like the proverbial beaten dog, and you feel miserable because instead of being perfect this day, you sucked. You wasted the whole day looking for aphids. You don’t view yourself as being worth anything. You’re useless. Why are you even breathing the air and taking up space?

We don’t live in a vacuum, so who are the first people we take it out on, whether by commission or omission, but the ones we love the most? We feel awful because we are such losers that everyone around us also feels horrible. As my old friend Zig Ziglar used to say, instead of taking it out on our families and friends, why didn’t we turn around and kick the dog directly, which in this case is our perfectionistic tendency? So personal and professional relationships are now strained because – whine, whine – we are not perfect. It seems to me rather than getting better, we are getting worse.

You haven’t done anything at this point, but you can’t admit it because you are so low that you become burned out, burned out at what? I’m not sure, but you are. You can’t do a darn thing. You can’t even stand to go to your desk. Well, that only makes you depressed, though I guess you are perfectly depressed, and the next thing you know, after several days or weeks of having the goal of being perfect, you find your body is falling apart to match your relationships. You’re taking Aleve for your headaches by the handful, you’re drinking Pepto Bismol for the stomach (a few of my friends drink Scotch and cough medicine instead), your stomach hurts, your bowels ache, even your knees hurt for no reason that makes sense, and you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in you don’t know when because you need to get back to work, which still you are avoiding, by the way. So you call your doctor for sleeping pills.

So, nothing is done. You’re afraid to work. Everything you do is wrong. You can’t take any risks because you can’t do much of anything. You’re worried you’re going to fail. (At what?) Your creativity and personal growth go out the window. Nothing in the world makes sense, but at least by gosh, you will be perfect.

Of course, that isn’t easy. You can’t celebrate your perfection when you haven’t done anything, right? That’s great for the self-esteem. And the things you did do? Well, you beat yourself up because you could have done better. Sometimes, you don’t know what you could have done to improve it, but you know something is hidden somewhere. You can’t be proud of what you do, so any achievements you might have accomplished are lost on you, though others might see them. They might even try to convince you, but you don’t listen. You’ve made up your mind. You’re a screw-up, and you know it. You think, “They’re just trying to make me feel good that I won the Nobel Prize. I did win it, but I could have done so much more. I hate this thing.” You give the Prize to your wife to use as a paperweight on her desk.

So you go through life overthinking everything you do, looking for that perfect execution or solution for every personal, professional, and life problem. You analyze yourself and everything you do so much that all you’ve got is a pile of analysis. And guess what? There’s not one positive figure in the whole darn spreadsheet.

As it becomes more progressive, you are so discombobulated that you can’t do anything. You become indecisive. You fear making the wrong choice when you haven’t made the first decent choice in who the hell knows when. The only thing you can think you’ve done right is ask the doctor for the sleeping pills, which, by the way, you need to get refilled because you’re now popping those things like Skittles.

So I asked my daughter, “Is this really how you want to go through life?”

She decided she would go outside and play volleyball.

Good girl. Good choice.

None of this is relevant to you, I’m sure.

But think it through if you see a modicum of something that sounds familiar.

For the last couple of decades, I’ve loved my life and my work. I do the best I can each day, and I love the best I can do, even with all the warts. I find I sleep just fine at night and am ready in the morning to get up, get busy, and actually get a lot of stuff done. It might not be perfect, but boy, I get stuff done.

And that’s good enough for me.