(high intensity rock music)
- What's up, everybody. Mark Manson here.
And I got a special video today.
Okay, it's not actually that special,
but I'm gonna just tell you it's special,
so that you feel special.
I do this thing on my site. It's called an AMA.
You've probably seen it on Reddit or something,
but for a couple years now, I give members of my site
a chance to ask me anything they want.
And then I sit down in front of a camera
and you know, pretend to know what I'm talking about.
And I figured, "Hey, I'm doing around the questions today.
Why don't I take one of the better ones,
and put it on the YouTubers,
and help the YouTubers out?"
That's you. You, that's Youtuber. (laughing)
All right, enough for the dad jokes.
So today we've got a really cool question
about perfectionism and how
it can it can fuck everything up,
despite your best intentions.
So intrepid reader, take it away.
Is striving for perfection self-defeating?
Whenever I commit to doing something that would benefit me
in my life, be it eliminating bad habits, a change in diet,
working out, I always put a lot of pressure on myself
to be doing things right without fail.
I can't miss my workout today, no matter what.
I have to eat only specific types of food every single day,
and not go over my calorie limit.
I need to wake up at 5:30 a.m. without fail.
These are just some examples of what goes on in my head,
but it goes for everything I set my sights on.
This need to do things right and not skip new habits takes
a lot out of me.
It takes a lot of discipline and willpower to stick with it.
And ultimately, I ended up failing to meet my own standards,
which results in me feeling bad,
and reverting back to old habits.
So look, my perfectionist, self-flagellating reader,
you self-sabotage or you.
You wanna know what I think about perfectionism.
How to deal with it, how to stop it,
what the fuck is going on?
You know, I can tell you, there's actually
only one way in life to be perfect.
That's to like and subscribe to this channel.
I mean, it sounds simple, right?
But I bet you can't do it perfectly.
I mean, just try. Try to click that button perfectly.
I bet you can't fucking do it.
Did you click it yet? Okay, okay.
Look, the short answer is
these are just made up standards in your head.
These are just these obscene, absurd, silly metrics
that you're creating for yourself, and you're deciding like,
"Oh my God, I woke up at 5:35. I'm a fucking loser.
I'm a fucking loser. I'm a fucking loser."
And it's not real, dude.
Look, I think we can all agree
that the problem here is not the goals.
These are nice goals to have.
In fact, a lot of us have these goals.
The problem is that you have
this all or nothing attitude about it.
That like, "If I don't wake up at 5:30 in the morning
for the rest of my fucking life, I failed,
and I might as well just give up," that's ridiculous.
Imagine if you applied that same mentality
to other things in your life.
Like imagine you were driving somewhere and you got lost
or you took a wrong turn and you're like, "Oh, fuck.
I guess I should go home now."
Or imagine you're having a conversation with a good friend,
and you say a word wrong, something comes out wrong.
And you're like, "Oh shit,
I guess I should just shut the up for the rest of my life."
It doesn't make any sense.
This is a strange prison you are inflicting on yourself.
And I would argue that you're using this
all or nothing mentality as a way to avoid
the responsibility of actually dealing with your failures.
See, it's easy to screw up one day,
and fuck up some of your goals and say, "You know what?
I wasn't trying in the first place.
Yeah, I give up." That's the easy way out.
That's the bullshitty way out.
It's much, much harder to wake up an hour late one day,
and be like, "Shit, I didn't mean to do that,
but it's all right, we're gonna take care of it tomorrow.
We're gonna do it again." That's the hard way out.
So that's the first thing I would tell you.
The second thing I'm gonna tell you is
that perfection is imperfect.
It's funny you use these examples
because if you actually look at the research
on diet nutrition, they actually find that breaking
a strict diet produces better results than adhering
to a strict diet religiously.
The same thing is true for working out.
If you go on bodybuilder forums or whatever,
you will find every single workout plan
that you come across, they build in rest periods.
They build in periods for you to stay home and sleep,
and let your body recuperate.
There's no such thing as working out every day
for the rest of your life.
That's just insanity.
And here's another turd I'm gonna leave in your soup bucket.
You don't get to decide how much sleep your body needs.
Sometimes your body needs more sleep,
and it has nothing to do with you, man,
has nothing to do with you.
It's not 'cause you're lazy. It's not 'cause you fucked up.
Sometimes you're stressed out,
or your girlfriend fucking gets mad at you.
And you're just exhausted,
and your body needs that extra hour.
And the fact that you're not letting your body have
that extra hour, 'cause you've got this bizarre idea
of productivity that you're trying to adhere to it,
you're actually hurting yourself.
You're making yourself less productive.
You're robbing yourself of energy and vitality and life.
(upbeat music)
So last year I wrote this book called
"Everything Is Fucked", a book about hope.
(trumpet buzzing)
Plug in my fucking book, read my book.
I wrote about how we have a thinking brain
and a feeling brain, and the thinking brain, you know,
it's all your thoughts, it's your plans,
it's your spreadsheets, it's the finances,
the calculations you do in your head,
all that sort of stuff.
And in your feeling brain, it's all of your impulses
and desires and feelings and all that shit.
Most of us kind of have this assumption
that our feelings need to be tamed by our thoughts.
That if we just have enough willpower and discipline,
that we can push these thoughts and impulses
and bad feelings out of our life.
This is, in the book, I refer to it
as the classic assumption.
Because if you look throughout Western history,
most philosophers, religious leaders, you know,
authority figures, they've always pushed this assumption
on the people, that if you stay in bed too long,
it's 'cause you're a lazy person.
Or if you cheat on your wife,
it's because you're a horrible person,
who can't control their impulses.
That you're evil, that you're a sinner.
And so throughout most of civilization,
people have been pushed to control their desires,
control their impulses.
Whether you realize it or not,
you're buying into the same assumption.
You are assuming that the only thing preventing you
from being a perfectly productive human being is
your willpower and desire to follow these goals
you set out for yourself.
Now here's the problem with that. And in fact, fuck it.
This is the harsh truth of the day.
(high intensity rock music)
The fact of the matter is is that
we don't completely get to control our impulses
and feelings and desires.
We don't always get to control how tired we are,
or how horny we are, or how ambitious we are,
or how awake we are.
A lot of these things happen outside of our will
and outside of our control.
So rather than imagining our thinking brain
as like the master who whips the feeling brain
in the shape, the truth is that we're all swimming
in a sea of impulses and desires.
And the best thing we can do is ride the tide as best we can
to try to get the shore.
What I'm saying, dude, is you can't control
a lot of these things you're trying to control.
In fact, you're gonna be much better off
if you change your understanding of perfection away from
some arbitrary action that happens at the same time
every single day, and instead focus on reacting well
to your body, reacting well to your emotions.
That is the real perfection you should be striving for.
That's the real shit you should get out of bed for.
And look, I know that that doesn't feel
as sexy to your brain as like, "Oh dude,
I got up at 5:30 in the morning for three years straight.
I'm a fucking man. Look at me."
When you tell your brain, "Hey, listen to your body,
respect your rest, respect that you need relaxation time."
And then adjust accordingly like a mature human being.
Like that's not a fun thing that you, you know,
post on Facebook about, or do an Instagram selfie,
and like, "Look at me, I'm got the six packs."
It's the boring tame mundane stuff
that actually makes a good life
that doesn't get any of the attention on the internet,
and doesn't sell $50 ebooks or whatever.
(upbeat music)
This unsexy idea of reaching a compromise
between your desires and what's actually healthy for you,
it goes back to Aristotle.
He believed that there was a golden mean
to all of our behaviors.
That between any two extremes,
the optimal behavior was somewhere in the middle.
Drinking alcohol all the time is not
the healthiest thing to do, but also abstaining
from alcohol is probably not the healthiest thing to do.
It turns out that the research shows that's correct.
Similarly, sleeping all fucking day is
probably not the best thing to do,
but also like forcing yourself to wake up
at God knows what hour every day is
also not the healthiest thing to do.
There is a certain golden medium
that we all have to find for ourselves.
And given that we have different genetics,
different personalities, different life histories,
different goals and interests and desires and relationships,
that golden mean is gonna be
a little bit different for everybody.
And so if some dude on the internet says 5:30.
It's gonna change your life. It might, it might not.
The thing is for each individual to discover
that golden mean, sometimes you have to go too far
to know exactly where to come back.
So now you tried the 5:30 thing. Maybe that's too far.
Maybe you come back to six. Maybe you go back to 6:30.
The point is that this is
a never-ending process of experimentation.
The optimization of ourselves,
there's no cookie-cutter model
that you can go find anywhere,
and it's always gonna change.
So you always have to keep working on it.
So there is no perfection. The perfection is imperfection.
So that's my answer.
Intrepid reader, self-flagellate or self-sabotage,
I hope this is helpful to you.
And if anybody else wants to ask questions,
I mean, check out my website, markmanson.net/ama.
You can go check out the questions there,
upvote them, add your own, sign up for the membership,
get a bunch of free, cool shit.
Or you can just comment here with whatever
you're trying to be perfect at, and failing miserably.
So as Oscar Wilde once put it,
everything in moderation, including moderation.
Motherfucking Manson out.
(high intensity rock music)