Image: Serge Krouglikoff Getty Images
In Brief
- Perfectionists can become discouraged by failing to meet impossibly high standards, making them reluctant to take on new challenges or even complete agreed-upon tasks. The insistence on dotting all the i’s can also breed inefficiency, causing delays, work overload and even poor results.
- Perfectionism can encompass some positive qualities, including a drive to succeed, an inclination to plan and organize, and a focus on excellence. So-called healthy perfectionists embrace the trait’s sunnier side while minimizing its darker features.
- In recent years researchers have developed tools to parse and measure the beneficial, along with the detrimental, aspects of perfectionism. In addition, they are developing treatment programs that push perfectionistic tendencies in a more positive direction.
David Liu is a technology entrepreneur in San Francisco. He has helped found several start-ups to market products he has developed, including those stylus pens the UPS driver hands you to sign for your packages. But even as he dreams up new inventions, an ongoing patter in his head objects that they are stupidly obvious. And despite his accomplishments, Liu teeters on a mental precipice: “It feels shameful, like, hey, I’m in my early 30s, I should have had a Yahoo by now—or I should at least have had a company I sold for tons of money.”
Liu is a perfectionist, someone who demands utmost excellence from himself, an expectation that can lead to fear of failure and reflexive self-criticism. Even when he is doing well, Liu has trouble feeling good about himself. “It’s so habitual, the beating-myself-up part,” he says.
See what we're tweeting about
12 Comments
Add CommentThis article contains a succinct, clear description of the nature of perfectionism and of the ways in which it can bedevil the lives of those who experience it in themselves or in others close to them. Over the course of a 30-plus year career as a psychotherapist and author who has given much personal and professional attention and study to this issue, I must side with those researchers who emphasize a distinction between perfectionism and striving for excellence, and who see healthy perfectionism as a kind of contradiction in terms. Perfectionism, as the term implies, is about being perfect -- not simply outstanding or highly successful. The emotional problem for perfectionists is not in the plain fact of failing to reach success, but rather in the meaning they ascribe to such failure. As most perfectionists, feeling overburdened and full of angst about how they are doing, begin to search for answers as to why they are this way, they discover that mistakes have always seemed to imply some kind of personal flaw. Perfectionism is a kind of self esteem issue, in which a common conviction one has is that, unless I am perfect, I am worthless. Perfection is felt to be a road to personal acceptability. Many people struggle mightily to achieve and are of course disappointed by less successful outcomes. They may refer to themselves as perfectionists, and they may end up in the conscientious, positive striving group that Frost and others have identified, but excellence and success are their goals, not perfection, and they do not in general worry that less-than-perfect performance is a sign of personal failing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerfectionists can and do encompass the many positive qualities Ms. Laber-Warren describes so well. If we could wave a magic wand and eliminate their perfectionism, none of these qualities would disappear -- only the anxieties about the necessity for perfection that so frequently haunt their road to success. The aim of perfectionism counseling is not simply to tame the traits destructive side. Telling a perfectionist to change in this way is heard as simply one more way in which he or she has not been perfect. The aim of counseling is to help perfectionists feel more acceptable for who they are as human beings, not simply for what they can do. That way, a mistake can seem to be just a mistake, not a sign of a character flaw.
Thomas S. Greenspon, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
Minneapolis
Therein lies one of the difficulties of speaking in clinical terms versus vernacular especially in a pop-culture medium such as Scientific American online. To the average non-psychologist, perfectionism or being a perfectionist might have different meanings than they do to psychologists. Some might use the word perfectionism when "striving for excellence", as the previous poster put it, is the intended meaning.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisrasciam,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can't speak for everyone, but I think the article is very clear.
Where you get the "pop-culture medium" idea from?
Most everyone who comments seems to be educated and very "down-to-earth", so to speak. You don't need to go over the "verbal edge" to express yourself.
As a professional organizer, I see people who suffer because they cannot decide on the "perfect solution" to their situations. While others may believe these people are lazy or sloppy, the truth is they are paralyzed by fear of making a bad choice. Working with a professional, they can be coached to understand that just making a choice is a step in the right direction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissuffer from the ability
It has seemed to me that 'destructive perfectionism' is characterized by a lack of limits or tolerance. Such people are puzzled when you suggest that there are appropriate tolernaces regarding about everything. Two boards need to fit together according to what you are doing. When you are inlaying decorative pieces not much tolerance at all, fences and framing somewhere about 1/8th of an inch is plenty good enough most of the time. An unhealthy perfectionist will counter, "well, if you are going to do it do it right", ie, no perceptable variation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI once thought that "The best is enemy of the good" was my grandmother's idea. You say it comes from Voltaire. I do not want to say this, but "The best is enemy of the good" and "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect" are both contained in the Holy Bible
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe original word at Matthew 7 can also be translated as 'complete', as in complete in love, which is what the context was referring to, so it's not referring to flawlessness in any way. I appreciate the balance suggested at Eccl. 7:16
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo not become righteous overmuch, nor show yourself excessively wise. Why should you cause desolation to yourself? 17 Do not be wicked overmuch, nor become foolish. Why should you die when it is not your time? 18 It is better that you should take hold of the one, but from the other also do not withdraw your hand
It is true that "The best is the enemy of the good", I think, 'cause persons who demands the best always overlook his or her defects and don't consider that to overcome some flaws is one have to do in life. People are given birth to work and overcome their difficulties occur in they road ahead.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have some experiences myself.
I am Chinese student and so, you can imagine the competitive situation which is very painful. Only because we have so many people and so few countparts schools and we have the brightest brain in the world but the social system is not good enough also due to the population.
And I am very strict with myself, and tell myself that : that question you know, and you must fill up it in the exam! or that person is not talent as you so just surpass him and get a *** top. But every time the mere outcome is depression and just be trapped in the depression and don't think how to get what I want.
So till the National College Entrance Examination. I spent so much time on some different problem and lose the questions that I can do. I can' t even lose a question and with the mood like that I fail the examination. I can do better if not having the perfectionism.
That is a lesson in my life, a extremely-high-price lesson.
Anyone that believes god is perfect has very low standards. Go to church and stay out of this otherwise very intellectual and interesting discussion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe people I know who are eager to label themselves as perfectionists, to a person, actually do few things perfectly. They are, rather, also to a person, raging narcissists who use the goal of perfection as an excuse to control and bully those around them. These bully narcissists also seem to fit the criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is healthy to try to be the best that you can. But perfection is not attainable for us faulty and diverse humans. I agree with johnwnorton in his assessment of people who label themselves as perfectionists. I simply try to get better at being me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are parents whose children never do things perfectly, according to their perception. This is perverse. A woman I know could never please her father. When she graduated cum laude from an ivy league college to which she had earned a merit scholarship, his response was, "Why not summa cum laude? She later earned a Ph.D., became a Distinguished Professor, wrote scholarly articles and books and still has not, in her 70s, recovered from a feeling of inadequacy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know personally three men, with ability and intelligence, who never finished Ph.D. dissertations because there was always something else to add or perfect. These three were victims of the sort of perverse perfectionism described in the article, I believe. I wouldn't encourage sloppy or mediocre work, but some people have to learn that good enough should suffice because perfection usually does not exist.