Hello!
Seiiti Arata.
Your perfectionism is ruining your productivity.
On one hand, doing your work with perfection is seen as a unique advantage, like a quality
that indicates high standards of professional execution.
All of us like to admire businessmen, artists or athletes who are almost perfect in what
they do.
Proof of that is that the number of people that consider themselves perfectionists has
increased.
A study [source: https://arata.se/source-4h9z] showed us that in the last three decades,
the amount of academics that call themselves perfectionists increased drastically.
It seems like everyone is looking for perfection.
But although perfectionism is perceived by many people as a quality, wanting to do your
work with perfection is actually a weakness.
Perfectionism destroys your productivity, makes you more stressed and a lot of times
it’s just an excuse for not doing what needs to be done.
This is a point of view that can seem harsh for you, so let’s see what affirmations
these are based on.
Perfectionism demands a lot of effort without bringing a proportional gain.
People like Michelangelo, Steve Jobs or Cristiano Ronaldo are known by the perfectionism in
their work, in different areas of expertise.
When we read stories about people like this, we are amazed by the quality of their results
and we wish in some way to be a professional on this level.
That’s why a lot of people say proudly that they’re perfectionists.
This is an attempt of being different from the rest, to advertise the excellence of their
work, to make the impression of being better than average.
But when we leave the world of narratives and we move into the real world, we can see
clearly that perfectionism is actually a weakness.
Even when we are talking about big names.
For example, Michelangelo spent more than five years making one of his most praised
sculptures,The Lamentation over the Dead Christ.
After all of those years sculpting more than two meters of marble, he thought that the
masterpiece wasn't perfect.
He got a sledgehammer and started to destroy the sculpture.
Steve Jobs wasted time, money and the patience of his employees just to paint the internal
part of the NeXT computers with black colour.
This helped to destroy the company sales that he founded after leaving Apple.
The product was very expensive and in practice no one opened the computers to see what was
the color inside.
These are the examples so you can see how even the most praised perfectionists have
many disadvantages with the craze of wanting to do everything perfectly.
Although there are some benefits, the disadvantages of being a perfectionist almost always outweigh
the advantages.
Companies don’t want to hire perfectionists because they are more stressed, anxious and
exhausted.
You can believe that being a perfectionist is a desired quality by the companies.
But a meta-analysis [source: https://arata.se/source-l7fs] that revised almost one hundred scientific
studies about perfectionism showed the contrary.
The data studied of more than twenty five thousand workers show that the perfectionists
had some advantages.
On one hand, the perfectionist workers were the most motivated, engaged and worked more
hours per day.
But on the other hand, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages by a lot.
Perfectionist workers get way more stressed, anxious and even depressed.
Various of them suffered from the Burnout Syndrome, feeling physically and mentally
exhausted in search of perfection.
The meta-analysis also showed that, in practice, there is no significant performance gain by
the perfectionist workers.
That is, there is no direct relation between perfectionism and productivity gain.
As a matter of fact, the perfectionists usually have inflexible and excessively high standards.
They evaluate their own behaviour too critically and have a mindset about everything or nothing
about their own performance.
All of this goes against what the best companies value currently: flexibility, balance, experimentation,
growth mindset.
These are difficult qualities to find in perfectionists.
That's why, when companies put on the scale the advantages and disadvantages of perfectionism,
they see that it’s not worth having a perfectionist team that is more motivated, engaged and that
spends more time working... if that perfectionism is costing the physical and mental health
of these people without any productivity gain.
Perfectionism is, at the same time, an impossible search for excellence and an unnecessary attempt
to escape failure.
A study published in 2002 [source: https://arata.se/source-lggf] showed that perfectionism divides itself into
two.
There are two types of perfectionism: the one that searches for excellence and the one
that tries to run away from failure.
These two types are useless and destroy your productivity.
The first type of perfectionists is the one that is always looking for excellence.
It’s common to think that this search for excellence is positive and that it generates
a high quality job, but what reality shows is that this search is useless and counterproductive.
While perfectionists can spend years thinking, planning and even trying to execute an ideal
job, other practical people deliver results.
A product or service delivered in practice, in real life, even with imperfections, is
much better than a supposedly perfect product that is never finished or delivered.
The second type of perfectionists is the one that tries to run away from failure.
The fear of delivering something that isn’t perfect paralyzes this second group of people.
These perfectionists prefer not to deliver the product or service than to deliver something
that may not work and be considered a failure.
The fear of failure a lot of times is also a form of procrastination, an excuse to not
act.
Those who consider themselves as perfectionists and never do what they are supposed to do,
justifying themselves by saying the ideal conditions that aren’t present or that the
project isn’t good enough.
This view of failure as something to be avoided should be overcome.
Failure helps us to understand our mistakes, to improve our work, to do better next time.
Success comes only to those who face it out, who go to the market and show their real work,
knowing the mistakes and successes will happen.
Abandon perfectionism to improve the quality of your work and become more productive.
It can seem contradictory, but abandoning perfectionism can improve the quality of your
work.
If you consider yourself a perfectionist, do an experiment.
Leave behind for a few weeks your search for perfection and your fear of failure.
During those weeks, focus on finishing projects, in delivering results, in spending more time
acting than thinking about perfection.
For that, use Parkinson’s Law and define for yourself tighter deadlines than normal.
Use deadlines that don’t allow you to deliver a perfect project.
Parkinson's Law says that our work expands in a way that fills in all the available time
to do it.
If you have a project with a deadline of one month, you will use the whole thirty days
to work on this project.
But if you had only one week, you would give all your effort to complete this project in
seven days.
Besides focusing on delivering results, even if imperfect, you can also let go of inflexible
and excessively high standards about you.
Lower expectations.
Take advantage of the experiment to do activities that help to reduce stress, anxiety and physical
and mental exhaustion.
After a few weeks experimenting, reevaluate how your deliveries were and how you feel
physically and emotionally.
See if your work got better, if your relationship with the team evolved and if you feel better
with yourself.
It’s very likely that by abandoning perfectionism you will come to the conclusion already known
that done is better than perfect.
Perfectionism is still seen by many as a quality to be achieved.
But in practice it shows that the search for perfection doesn’t bring productivity gains
and generates stress, anxiety and exhaustion.
Besides that, there isn’t a correlation between perfectionism and performance at work.
Therefore, if you want to be more productive, abandon your search for perfection and the
fear of failure.
Instead of using perfectionism as a kind of excuse to not get into action, stop delaying
and start delivering results, even if they’re imperfect.
By the way, if you need more help on how to stop delaying, I invite you to see a special
lesson from the course Productivity Ninja about procrastination.
You can see this lesson right now by accessing http://arata.se/delaying