Most people agree that being good at the things you do is important. But for a select group of people, this tendency becomes quite the habit, these are the people known as perfectionists. Now when you hear that word, you may think of some high powered, bossy suit clad businessperson. But what may surprise you is that perfectionism is quite silent, and often lurks in our day to day actions. What may be considered an admirable trait in the area of business is anything but in our regular lives. Like many people I consider myself a perfectionist, and I want to dispel the myth of perfectionism as an attainable goal for ourselves.
This is my sophomore year in college, like every student I worry about balancing things in my life. When you combine involvement, classwork, and having a social life, doing things perfectly becomes an unscalable problem. When one area of your life becomes complicated, you feel as if the "failure" will spread to others (aka a perfectionist's worst nightmare). My room is much cleaner than others, I don't say this to brag, but when I look at it I don't see cleanliness, I see books that don't match, tiny bits of dust, and things that aren't lined up. When test season starts, I become busier and less preoccupied with putting my clothes in the hamper. After a while the clothes become a noticeable mess. When my room is messy, I don't have the 'perfect' arrangement and get stressed rather easily. As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time cleaning and rearranging furniture in my room, not only does it de-stress me but it's nice to improve the aesthetics of my space.
What underlies perfectionism is the idea that we are improving ourselves when we do everything right. But perfectionism is not self improvement, it is the futile enterprise to avoid an ordinary part of everyday life: failure. When life happens (too many things to do perfectly in a reasonable amount of time), perfectionism becomes a noticeably destructive enterprise. If I get a grade I didn't like on a test the feeling of failure overwhelms me. Why wasn't I good enough? Does this mean I'm going to keep failing? Once these thoughts fade, the desire to do it right the next time becomes a predominant thought with each quiz, test, or assignment that comes after. The failure lingers in everything I do relating to that class later on, because the thought of failing again is just too awful.
Our generation has been taught to conflate the reality of human imperfection with being a failure. The reality is that our lives are too complicated to control everything and do everything perfectly. We will eventually fail at something, whether it be small or large. The point of life is realize this and to do the best we can with what we have. We aren't meant to live a magazine spread life, we are human, and we make mistakes and fall short sometimes. Don't be a perfectionist because all you will end up doing is making yourself perfectly miserable by holding yourself to standards you can't possibly achieve.
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
-Michael Jordan
Check out this video where Jane Fonda talks about her own struggle with perfectionism...
