We typically aim for a particular career because we have been deeply impressed by the exploits
of the most accomplished practitioners in the field. We formulate our ambitions by admiring
the beautiful structures of the architect tasked with designing the city’s new airport,
or by following the intrepid trades of the wealthiest Wall Street fund manager, by reading
the analyses of the acclaimed literary novelist or sampling the piquant meals in the restaurant
of a prize-winning chef. We form our career plans on the basis of perfection. Then, inspired
by the masters, we take our own first steps and trouble begins. What we have managed to
design, or make in our first month of trading, or write in an early short story, or cook
for the family is markedly and absurdly, beneath the standard that first sparked our ambitions.
We who are so aware of excellence end up the least able to tolerate mediocrity – which
in this case, happens to be our own. We become stuck in an uncomfortable paradox: our ambitions
have been ignited by greatness, but everything we know of ourselves points to congenital
ineptitude. We have fallen into what we can term the Perfectionist Trap, defined as a
powerful attraction to perfection shorn of any mature or sufficient understanding of
what is required to attain it. It isn’t primarily our fault. Without in any way revealing
this, or even perhaps being aware of it, our media edits out billions of unremarkable lives
and years of failure, rejection and frustration even in those who do achieve – in order
to serve up a daily curated selection of peak career moments, which thereby end up seeming
not like the violent exceptions that they are, but a norm and baseline of achievement.
It starts to appear as though ‘everyone’ is successful because all those who we happen
to hear about really are successes – and we have forgotten to imagine the oceans of
tears and despair that necessarily surround them. Our perspective is imbalanced because
we know our own struggles so well from the inside, and yet are exposed to apparently
pain-free narratives of achievement on the outside. We cannot forgive ourselves the horrors
of our early drafts – largely because we have not seen the early drafts of those we
admire. We need a saner picture of how many difficulties lie behind everything we would
wish to emulate. We should not look, for example, at the masterpieces of art in a museum. We
should go to the studio and there see the anguish, wrecked early versions and watermarks
on the paper where the artist broke down and wept. We should focus on how long it took
the architect before they received their first proper commission (they were over 50), we need to dig
out the early stories of the writer who now wins prizes and examine more closely how many
failures the entrepreneur had to endure. We need to recognise the legitimate and necessary
role of failure, allow ourselves to do things quite imperfectly for a very long time – as
a price we cannot avoid paying for an opportunity one day, perhaps in many decades, to do something
that others will consider a spontaneous success.