Hi, my name is Mark, and I’m a perfectaholic. As long as I can remember, I’ve been a perfectionist. I’m not sure whether it’s nature or nurture. Was I born this way? Was I somehow conditioned to be this way? It doesn’t really matter. It is what it is, and I have to deal with it.
Many of you might not recognize it for the disadvantage that it is. You might look at someone who is a perfectionist and think that he or she just has really high standards. If that was all there was to it, it wouldn’t be a problem. Part of it actually stems from a fear of being imperfect.
Sometimes it drives perfectionists to work on perfecting something that isn’t really worth perfecting. Other times it causes perfectionists to procrastinate. If we don’t know how to do something, for example, then there is a good chance that we won’t do it perfectly, so we just put it off. I think my perfectionism and my tendency to procrastinate are inextricably linked.
Perfectionism isn’t only a problem with perfectionists
I think we all have a problem with perfectionism. It is a matter of degrees. If you have a fear of failure, then you essentially have a problem with perfectionism. The problem is that success and failure are inextricably linked. It is impossible to really succeed without failing. As I mentioned in my post Put Your Dream into Action, if you want to be successful, then you need to Fail. A lot.
It may sound strange, but my mission is to fail much more than I have in the past. Failure is a direct and unavoidable result of taking action, and action is a very necessary ingredient in becoming successful. Thomas Edison was one of the most successful inventors in history. He did it by being one of the biggest failures in history. Ty Cobb has the highest career batting average in Major League Baseball history, but he failed to get a hit about 63% of the time.
The Formula for Success
Here is a common sense formula that you should keep in mind:
Expected Number of Successful Outcomes = Probability of Success X Number of Attempts
If you call heads on 10 coin flips, you would expect 5 successful outcomes (i.e. Expected Number of Successful Outcomes = 50% X 10). If Ty Cobb went to bat 100 times, he would expect to get about 37 hits, which is equal to his batting average multiplied by 100 at bats. Unfortunately, we don’t always know the probability of success. Top salespeople often do know their probability of success. They measure things like the percentage of prospects that they close successfully, and then they can get a good idea of how many prospects that they need to meet with to meet their sales goals.
The Secret of Success that You Might not Know about
We can increase the expected number of successful outcomes by increasing either the probability of success or the number of attempts, but there is one secret of success that my mind refused to accept for a long time. The number of attempts that you make is generally more important than the probability of success.
For the longest time, I wasted most of my efforts on focusing on improving my probability of success. The problem is that it is usually much easier to increase your number of attempts than it is to increase your probability of success. The guy at the bar who acts like an idiot but hits on large numbers of women will go home with a lot of women. Percentagewise, the number might be low, but he will still have a high number of successful outcomes (i.e. he will get laid a lot).
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t spend any time trying to increase your probability of success. It just means that you will quite often be much better off by taking action sooner rather than later. Then improve as you go along. I don’t know much about blogging, but I have decided to stop worrying about it. I know that I will have failures. Not all my posts will be good. Not everyone will like what I write. The formatting of my website needs work.
My motto since I started this blog has been “Go with it.” Sure, I will have my failures, but I’m just going to go with it. It’s much more fun that way.
You know, Bill. There’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years. Sometimes you gotta say, “What the fuck. Make your move.”
- Joel Goodson, Risky Business
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Great ideas in this post. I think this applies to life and business in general. I’ve failed many times in my life at many ventures, yet all of them have finally lead me to to the path that I”m on now and living the life I want.
On the fear of failure:
Babe Ruth, the sultan of swat, by reputation one of the best baseball players ‘EVER’. He simultaneously held the title of the most home runs hit and the most strikeouts of any major league player.
On perfectionism in general:
I think of the 80:20 principle. Good not perfect, but good is good enough to generate 80ty percent of the return (with 20% of the effort). Perfectionism leverages that herculean and sometimes heroic level of human commitment (the remaining 80%) for that last 20% of return.
I have gotten lectures from many a co-worker over the past year. I have taught myself to never give 100% to anything; as a result I leave earlier and do less work (personal effort) than most people I work with. What frustrates many a cow-worker is that I get more done (from a project delivery aspect) than anyone in my department. My contemporaries complain; “Paul’s solutions could be better, they are not even close to perfect!” … and they are right! The project managers argue back on my behalf, but his solutions work; and the end users can’t tell the difference between ‘works’ and ‘perfect’… they just don’t know and don’t frankly care to learn.
Lately project managers are asking for me specifically to be on their teams, because I get the job done 100% of the time on time. I may not be elegant or pretty with my work, but I don’t work all that hard at it so that’s ok with me. My co-workers work many more hours than I perfecting their deliverables, making some of the most elegant solutions I have seen, that are more often than not late and over budget (project managers love that, so do the end users).
I also frequently let the perfect get in the way of the good. And there’s no doubt it is from fear of failure. I’ve spent the last several years working on that, including throwing myself into hobbies that I’m not yet good at, despite my knowledge that it would mean 99% failure for a while. It’s difficult, but ultimately rewarding. And I have to constantly remind myself that not doing something perfectly (or even correctly – or sometimes even “good enough”) is actually okay. The world doesn’t come to an end when I fail. And if I keep my head together, I can laugh it off and learn something about how to do it better the next time.
I’m reminded of the quote from Thomas Edison (though there seem to be a lot of versions of it):
“I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
I am becoming an expert on ways that won’t work… and that’s okay.
Srini: I hope to fail as much as you so that I too can live the life that I want.
Paul: I think that you have the right idea. Although I have always been very productive, I think that I can stand some improvement in recognizing when good enough is good enough.
Frydaze1: I think that one thing that we all need to remember is that we are all born knowing absolutely nothing. If others have learned to do something, then in most cases that means we can too. The people who know how to do something certainly made their share of mistakes along the way. I need to remind myself of this a lot more so that I am encouraged to take action despite inevitable mistakes.
Very insightful, I think I have the same affliction. Perhaps it comes from having a lot of success and achievement when young? You get accustomed to success, and the longer you sustain it the more you fear inevitable failure. You want to think of yourself as “special” in some way, not “normal” like everyone else.
Is reading self-improvement blogs like this a symptom?
progmtl,
You might have a point there. I had a lot of success and achievement early on, and then it became expected of me. Around junior year of high school, I actually started to wish that I had not set the expectation level so high. I have actually made a great deal of progress in regards to my perfectionism since then. Back then, it was somewhat obsessive.
In any case, I suspect that high expectations were only a part of the problem for me. I was also extremely shy growing up, although I’ve outgrown that for the most part. However, I’m still very shy about approaching women, unless I have zero intentions about being with the woman. The point that I’m getting at is that fear of rejection is part of the problem. The funny thing is that I consciously understand how stupid the fear is, but I have the fear anyway. That’s how deeply rooted our fears can be.
hi mark,
how are you?
found you on the infopreneurs blog
i loved this article because i could relate to it being a perfectionist myself lol!! i must say i’ve been inspired to now increase the number of my attempts henceforth.
take care
Ayo,
I’m doing great. I’ve been hearing a lot from other perfectionists. I guess that the problem is pretty widespread. Let’s see if we can do something about it!
By the way, I am also a blogaholic. I just subscribed to your blog.
“The point that I’m getting at is that fear of rejection is part of the problem. The funny thing is that I consciously understand how stupid the fear is, but I have the fear anyway. That’s how deeply rooted our fears can be.”
- Is it no the stupidest thing? I know exactly how you feel.
Good post. I’ve made a conscious effort to try and tame perfectionism. I think the best way is to look at it as an external force (if i’m not mistaken, this is the same principle as exorcism). So when have an external awareness of your perfectionist habits, you can simply decide that you won’t let it effect your actions. Although this is a lot easier said than done.
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