The Perils of Perfectionism | A Guide to Imperfection

How comfortable are you with making mistakes? Does perfectionism ever creep into your work? A curious paradox is a need to loosen our grip on perfection to achieve success. The wisdom of imperfection is a perennial lesson from some of the greatest thinkers throughout history.

For example, Vincent Van Gogh stressed this point,

If one wants to be active, one must not be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they will achieve it by doing no harm — and that’s a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of nonsense.

The Enemy of the Good

In my interview with Karen Swallow Prior (author of On Reading Well), she explained,

The old saying is that the best is the enemy of the good. The virtue of prudence is practical wisdom on the ground and, by its very nature, goes against perfectionism. Striving for the best instead of doing something often prevents us from accomplishing anything. Prudence knows how to weigh and measure all factors to get something done. As opposed to putting it off until it is perfect.

At the start of any project, we must navigate our inner voice. Steven Pressfield (author of the classic War of Art) calls it resistance. “Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance,” according to Pressfield. If the task or project meant nothing to us, there would be no Resistance.

Getting Started

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

An essay titled On Success by William Hazlitt suggested the surest hindrance to getting started is having too high a standard of refinement. The person determined not to be satisfied with anything short of perfection will never do anything at all.

Where does your high standard originate? Is it intrinsic or from the thoughts and opinions of others?

The Critics

A notable passage from a speech (Citizenship in a Republic, 1910) by former President Theodore Roosevelt referred to as The Man in the Arena advises against listening to the critics:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Keeping Moving

The writer Anne Lamott calls perfectionism the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and moving forward. In the classic Infinite Jest, author David Foster Wallace asked,

Suppose I were to give you a key ring with a hundred keys, and I was to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we imagine opening in onto all you want to be. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?

According to Wallace, if the answer is all of them. Then you are willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist would stand there before that door jingling the keys, afraid to try the first key.

Image: The Perfectionist by Grant Wood (1936, public domain)

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