Some people describe perfectionism as their quality and hobby. They are proud of it and boast about it. Why not? I think it is something that we believe qualifies us as intellectuals and ranks us high on the scale. But one thing I have learned later in life is to unlearn perfectionism. It does not help us as much as we think.
Now you can say that it makes everything reach its best and most flawless form. But in reality, it actually makes us spend too much time on one cycle where we could have achieved much more. Plus, it sets everything at an unattainable parameter by placing them on this very high pedestal.
Not just once, but many times in my life, I have felt like I am delaying a lot of things or like I’m late at almost everything. And when I look deep into it, the reason I found was that I intentionally—or not so intentionally—delayed it because I wanted it to be the super perfect thing. In doing so, I just kept making so many changes in it; kept updating it; kept thinking more about it. I tried to make it flawless, and in my defense, I would say that I wanted better for it. But in reality, we just don’t exactly know. We can’t exactly frame the definition of better in such scenarios.
I have seen a lot of situations in my life, where we were supposed to update each and everything—there is always something that is left behind to be updated and it needs to be done. Well, for that something, I would like to say that it is never complete and is neither going to be completed.
Why is it so? I think because it simply depends on your capability to think, to go deeper into everything, or to contemplate more on everything. Spending just too much time on just one sheet of paper, watching it again and again, won’t improve anything in it. There’s always this one paragraph which needs improvement, which can be done better, which has the potential. And it simply depends on you—at one level, you can spend just a lot of time reframing each paragraph, overthinking each of them, and basically structuring each and everything into the best possible way. Then you can go on a deeper level and basically check all the words as well if you want to, and then it will take even more time.
On one hand, you can say that you are doing your best to meticulously articulate each word to perfection and to make your work come out good in the end. But if you just look at the bigger picture, you are actually just spending unnecessary time on things which could just be left alone, or it could have been completed simply. And if it’s not, then it’s simply because of this perfectionism.
Where does this perfectionism come from in us? Like, are we just born with it? Is it just this one quality that we have right from the moment when we are present in this world? Did it come with our hands or in our head? Is it something like this, or did we just adapt to it? Or did it just one day strike us like lightning on a thundering day, and from that moment on we just started carrying it like a possession?
So what exactly happened here? Well, here we can talk about society’s influence, which does actually have a really huge, insurmountable amount of impact on our lives. And I think I would rather write a lot more on this topic in a separate article, but for now, I would just like to conclude it in a sentence: the society where we live actually, in some way or another, either intentionally or—well, you can say unintentionally, but I would like to go for the first option—intentionally… Those who are intentionally trying to feed this to us actually don’t know, unintentionally, that they’re doing it.
So that’s the scenario here. But whatever the way it is, it actually comes down to us and it is handed down to us as one of the unseen qualities that we inherit from our environment. It’s just like being a sponge in water—if you are a sponge and you’re surrounded by water, you will eventually start absorbing that. That is the kind of process it is. This actually happens with society, and this perfectionism is one of those things which gets injected into us as our environmental effects, as we see others doing it, as what is perceived to be the better, as what in the end always wins.
So we assume that the one who wins is the winner because he has something which is better than the rest, which is more perfect than the others, and which is more refined than the others. We just assume that all the others are not so perfect and that the one who actually won achieved perfection and did the most immaculate work in the test. But this is actually, in itself, a very wrong criteria. We cannot really categorize those who did not win or things which could not go that far as imperfect. And on the same hand, we cannot really categorize the one who wins always to be the perfect one.
There’s another thing interacting in this phenomenon, and that is chance—that is luck—that is that 1% of uncertainty. Basically, even if there are two things which are made at the entire same level, with the entire same amount of efforts, and perhaps with the same degree of perfection, still one of them would go on to win and the other one would not. In this scenario, you cannot actually categorize the one which could not win as the imperfect one and the one who did win as perfect.
This scale in itself is wrong, and when we zoom out of it, then our process of learning that those who win are perfect becomes wrong. And then us absorbing and inferring that we need to be the perfect one because we want to win—that ultimately becomes a wrong dilemma and a wrong concept. And we are basically inheriting that wrong concept because, whether you accept it or you don’t, either you understand it or you don’t, you live by it or you don’t, you try to correct it or you don’t—but everybody at some point in their lives, in some scenario, or, you can say, in most scenarios, wants to win. We want to be the winners. We want to be the one on the top. We want to be that one percent on the summit. And just to be that one thing, we actually then structure and frame all of our life actions to align with the procedure or the process which will eventually get us to the top, which will make us the winner. And that is how this whole process is constructed—or actually, that is how I would say it is constructed. It basically make us fall into the trap of perfectionism.
We want to be the winners. This is one thing that is given to us by the ranks generated and the hierarchy created in the society. To become the winners, we assume—the one more thing we infer—that we have to be perfection, the most perfect amongst the competitors. And then the third thing we get wrong is basically that those who win are the perfect ones and those who don’t are not so perfect.
So this was all the circle of how we basically ended up being perfectionists in our lives.
The other thing I would mention here is that not only have we inculcated it from our society in one way or the other, but one more thing that really exists around us is basically that being a perfectionist or perfectionism in itself is a fashion. Now I’ll explain how.
We see people—just as I said that we assume that those who win are basically the perfectionists. This is what we think. And then we celebrate those people. And then we try to learn their qualities or how they did it. And we perceive them as some ideal people doing a really good job. And that is how it becomes a trend, because somehow everybody starts following it. Somehow everybody starts liking it. And somehow everybody just starts assuming it to be the perfect, the golden rules to achieve the very specific respective thing. And that is how it actually becomes a fashion. And we have seen a lot of fashion-enabled perfectionists in our respective fields.
So I remember when I first learned about James Cameron, one more thing that was mentioned about him was that he was such a perfectionist. He believed in capturing the most perfect or the beautiful shot so much that he would continue to take that shot numerous times. And because his story has actually become a success story, and obviously we think he’s the winner at the end of the day, we assume that he is a perfectionist—that is why he actually won. We create this link between the two.
And then we have another famous perfectionist. If we just turn towards Bollywood, we have another renowned perfectionist there. He is actually known as the perfectionist—Aamir Khan. Somebody who won’t compromise on his work and he would just do it in the best possible method in his mind because that is what he thinks is perfect. And once again here, we think that because he’s successful, that’s the perfectionism.
These are actually some high-profile examples, but if you just come down from there, you would see in various other fields—whether you see cricketers, whether you see the cooks, or those those who are just doing very small works—we just think that because they are continuing it to the perfect level, that is why they’re achieving that good result at the end.
But there’s just this one twist in the story. And that is how it actually becomes a fashion in our society.
Now there is just one twist in the story: these are fashions. We do follow them as fashions, but really it is a very wrong trend and we actually don’t know that it’s a false idea because we never get to see the other side of the picture, which is obviously that there are many other people who did their best, who basically did their very best and put in all their efforts but still could not come out as the winner or the one at the top. And similarly, there are various others who are still working extremely hard, but we don’t know them as much as we know these celebrated figures.
And in today’s culture, popularity actually plays a vital role in spreading any idea, any ideology. And perfectionism is one of those. Because we could not see—those who do their best but could not win have become something hidden under the rug and we don’t actually make the effort of taking off the rug and seeing what’s beneath there. That is the reason we could not see all of those, and what we see at the end we just consider to be the perfect one.
That was all about the fashion trend which is related to perfectionism.
And now I think I would say that when we understand all of this theory and ideology, there is just one point which comes in our lives when we really need to think that we need to unlearn this whole ideology. Just as we grow up, we need to unlearn so many other things in our lives. Similarly, this thing is one of those. We need to get rid of it. We need to shed this ideology and this whole concept and basically teach ourselves on our own. We have to be our own teachers—the teachers of the child that we were once. And basically, this is all what life is about, and unlearning perfectionism is one of those ideologies.
One more thing that perfectionism does to you is that because you consider going the extra mile to make something just sparkle and make it perfect, it basically makes it just much too difficult for you. Because in the end, you want it to be a very high, peaky mountain, and when you set the bar so high, the mountain actually becomes insurmountable for you. And that is one reason why sometimes we are unable to start some activity—because we have arranged them or ranked them on such a high level that we think it is not achievable and we don’t even dare to start that thing.
Now there’s one more thing that perfectionism does wrong for us, and that is something that happens in our lives a lot. I think there are a lot of tasks in our lives which are pending. They have been on our to-do list for so long, and the sole reason for that is we think they are too difficult to carry out. Why do we think so? Because we want to execute them to perfection. We want to achieve them in the best possible way, and that is how things just stay left behind on our to-do list.
And it is actually a story of those nights or those tasks which were on my list for so long—when I just kept thinking about making that one CV and imbuing everything with perfectionism in it. Because I considered that it’s a very crucial, milestone document that would arrange my future in one way, I wanted each and every bit of it to be perfect. I wanted every element in it to even breathe and sound like perfection, and it was one of the reasons I just could not even start it. Writing that first letter was so difficult, and I just kept overthinking again and again before adding even the first letter, and that actually kept delaying the beginning of that thing. And this is actually how things don’t work out for us.
Now here we see that when we are focusing on looking at the very, very big picture, when we are making this very high mountain, it is how we make it seem impossible for us.
And how can we find solutions for it? By simply not doing what we are doing, I think. By simply choosing not to be the best all the time. By simply choosing not to pursue perfection all the time. By simply learning that there are various many people who are living among us, breathing among us, who are putting their best into their lives, who are doing a miraculous amount of work, but they are not the winners. They just could not—there was some amount of uncertainty, some amount of privilege, some chains of chances, and the combination of all those elements ended up with them not being at the top. And now we cannot consider them as the losers—definitely not. And they’re not imperfect either.
You can start it right now by simply just starting it right now. That is how simple it is. That is how easy it could be if you just stop thinking about perfectionism. If you just stop looking at the very big picture and the very high mountain and just start looking at the inner atoms. Start working on that one element, that one atom that will constitute it. And just don’t think about it coming out as perfect. Maybe just put your good efforts and good wishes in it.
You will not be perfect in your first attempt. But your first attempt will start that chain of events and attempts which will actually make you proficient in the end. That is the whole story of it. That is how actually you can just build the whole picture from the constitution of all those atoms. And that is basically by taking that very one step— you can actually climb that mountain. The very insurmountable one will become surmountable. The untouchable will become touchable. And the imperfect will eventually become perfect without you even knowing.
So there are a lot of items on our to-do list. Perhaps you have a very substantial text to write. Perhaps you have that very tedious task to do. Perhaps you have that very intricate video to make. Perhaps you have that very lengthy essay to write. Perhaps you have that very daunting, difficult project to be done.
I think you can do it if you just start doing it. If you just stop thinking about it and simply take that one forgotten first step. By not taking it too seriously. By allowing yourself to breathe and actually live and not suffocate under the pressure of being the perfectionist. And by simply telling yourself that let’s start. Let’s begin it. Why not do it right now? Because why would it matter if it does not come out right, if it does not come out perfect? If we don’t actually care about perfectionism.
Perhaps that is that one way we can actually tell ourselves to just start it. That is why I think you need to ask yourself about that one task that has been pending for infinite time on your list.
And ask yourself: ‘Shall we do the honours?‘
