perfectionism is the unreasonable and self-defeating ambition of getting
something absolutely right - which makes us difficult to be around and punishing
to live within. The origins of perfectionism lie in the imagination.
In the ease with which we can conjure up a picture of an ideal state of affairs
compared with the monstrous difficulty of bringing such a state into being by
ourselves. The sickness of perfectionism just states in a fertile gap between our
noble visions and our mediocre reality and yet our problems do not ultimately
arise just in our love of perfection. They lie in our reckless tendencies to
under-budget for the difficulties of achieving perfection. The proper target
for gentle criticism is premature perfectionism. How accurately we budget
for time and effort is always dependent on a proper grasp of the inherent
difficulty of any task. If we fully recognize something to be exceptionally
difficult we don't panic when our first efforts are
weak and progress slow. It's difficult but we knew it would be. High standards
only become a problem when we think something might and should be
substantially easier than it turns out to be and when we read our struggles as
marks of our own ineptitude rather than as an inevitable part of a legitimately
lengthy journey. Perfectionism is only a problem because we have under-budgeted
for difficulty not because we are aiming high. It strikes when we imagine we might
write a good novel in six months or have a good career by the age of 30 or have
worked out spontaneously how to have a successful marriage.
our perfectionism starts to torture us when we lack information on how hard
others had to work and how much they had to suffer before reaching their ideas of
perfection. In a better world culture would endlessly draw to our attention
the first draft and hidden labors of other people and properly alert us to
the true horrors exacted by anything worth doing. We would not then be so
impatient and such sickly perfectionists. We would be patient resilient Questers
for excellence. The problem isn't that we're aiming for perfection. It's that we
don't have an accurately redemptive idea of what perfection really demands. At the
School of Life we believe in developing emotional intelligence to that end we've
also created a whole range of products to support that growth find out more at
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