Perfectionism: Is it perfect?

J. D. Roth holds forth on the subject of perfectionism, which he suggests is “the enemy of the good.” The point he makes, which is well taken, is that you can waste enormous amounts of time and ruin your health in the pursuit of perfection.

True, to a degree. I have a friend who, having burned out in a high-stress altruistic occupation, decided to apprentice himself to become a carpenter. He was very talented, but he never got anything done because everything had to be EXACTLY perfect. My ex- and I gave him cash to build a dining-room breakfront for us…we never saw either the furniture or the money again. And Friend never did become a master carpenter. He ended up going back to riding herd on juvenile delinquents.

On the other hand, my own experience is that if you set your target too low, you never come up to your full potential. When I was a young thing in college, I discovered that if I would compromise by doing what other people wanted me to do instead of what I set myself to do, I could perform quite well at the lesser tasks that were set for me, with very little effort. The perfectionistic bent I had cultivated as a youngster was, it developed, unnecessary. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from a backwater state university (instead of Berkeley, where I’d spent my high-school years preparing to go), with a pointless degree that suited me for nothing other than marriage to a man of the sort my parents felt I should marry. Although the grades looked great and the man was a six-figure earner and a decent husband, I never did get to do what I wanted to do with my life.

In the workplace, where mediocrity is the standard, few people will notice that you do anything perfectly (except to resent you for it). They will notice when it takes you forever to get things done, though. You’re better off to do a good job without sweating perfection. If you fail to keep your own standards up, you’ll eventually fall short of your personal goals, and you’ll find yourself performing at the same lackluster pace as the rest of the herd.

The discovery that nothing has to be perfect can lead you to waste as much time as you would in pursuit of the ideal.

Once you realize you don’t really have to do your best in order to get by—or indeed, to generate spectacular annual performance reviews at the office—you stop trying to do your best. You devote your creativity to getting the job done with the least amount of work possible, and that can backfire on you. If you haven’t done an adequate job, sooner or later you’ll either face the consequences that occur when an important issue has been missed or you’ll have to do the whole darned thing over again.

Case in point: Recently I fobbed half of a large project onto one of my young pups, figuring she could do it as well as anyone. While she knows little about the subject matter, she’s technically skilled and I expected she would do “good enough.” I did the other half, hurriedly because it’s a job I dislike that requires a full week of dreary, mind-numbing plodding. Reveling in short-timer’s syndrome, I just wanted to get the damn thing off my desk and walk out the door with the keys locked inside the office.

The result was a study in mediocrity. And—no surprise!—our client editor noticed. Now he’s demanding fix after fix after ditzy time-consuming fix. Tomorrow I’ll have to spend the entire day in the office cleaning up the mess, and if that doesn’t satisfy him, I may actually have to toss the entire thing and start over! That will happen just as 40 ten-page papers come in from my students—400 pages of drivel to read in the few days before final grades are due. I’ve already spent way more time on this job than I should have, and we’re now a week late against the deadline we set for going to the printer. By the time we’re done, we’ll be two weeks late.

A little perfectionism goes a long way…