Friday, July 22, 2016
How To Train Your Brain to Push Past Perfectionism
Fast Company | Business + Innovation: The fear of failure greatly impedes performance. That’s why most successful people are less likely to be perfectionists. After all, think about all of the quick, important decisions high-level people need to make every day. They can’t be plagued with the fear that every decision is a possible mistake. If surgeons waited until they felt absolutely sure that they were making the correct decision in life-threatening instances, they probably wouldn’t be saving many lives.
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6 comments:
It is really comforting to hear a company as successful as Facebook does not have their focus on “perfection” as society perceives it. One of the things that I have the hardest time with when working on a project, especially if it is artistic, is deciding when I am done. When I work on something up close for an extended period of time, I see the flaws and the little anomalies, but I constantly have to remind myself that that is because I am right up next to it. It takes stepping back from the work and maybe getting another opinion to see the project in perspective. The addiction to achieving perfection is something that we have to consciously address in order to overcome. A big part of theater is budgeting time, and that can only happen if we let go of extreme perfectionism and focus instead on the best work we can do within a time frame.
This is something I can really struggle with from to time. On many tasks, I put in just the effort needed to finish the task, but occasionally I get completely crazy and will spend hour upon hour working to make something "perfect". This is something I really struggle with in art. Since art really has no finished point, I can get completely obsessive and spend hours on something that could've taken only a few moments. This is partially why I gravitate more towards the technical side of tech theater rather than the design aspect; working as a designer would just drive me to insanity. I think that the part about parents or teachers teaching perfectionism makes a lot of sense. My parents push me to unreasonable standards a lot, and as a result I feel the need to push my work to the extreme. I guess there's hope for me, since apparently perfectionism can be unlearned too.
I don't believe that with the current model for education we have this is an effect that can be reversed. Often senior analysts and parents tell their kids to not be perfectionists, yet they don't realize that high school kids don't have time to worry about not being a perfectionist. 4 years, that is 4 years of high school you have, while going through the development of a regular teenager and worrying about college applications, there is no time to not be a perfectionist. The reality is that when a college views your GPA they're not concerned with your attempts to not be a perfectionist, and a score doesn't have a huge plot of development behind it.
In my time at Pre-College, I have definitely seen my tendency to be a perfectionist, in all the ways described in the article. I have never viewed being a perfectionist as a bad thing; I just found it a different way of working. I agree with the steps suggested to help with perfectionism a lot. Personally, I always set a timer for myself when I am doing a task. This helps me not only optimize my time, but it also helps me greatly get over the idea that there is such a thing as perfect. The amount of times that I have restarted projects because I am worried about them being perfect is crazy, when I think about how I could have been doing other important things rather than redoing something to try and make it perfect. I have found that the best way to combat perfectionism is to crash. By this I mean there is a point when everyone can no longer keep going at the same pace anymore. When you hit point you realize that perfect is an unattainable goal and slowly but surly, you lose your perfectionist tendencies.
This article is very relevant to society today. Personally I think we have a somewhat distinct line in parenting. One being parents wanting their children to be perfectionists and ones wanting their child to explore for their own. I think I fall into the tendency acts as a perfectionist. I think the main reason that being a perfectionist is a thing is the idea of someone being better, so to be even better than that, you need to take the perfectionist route. Even though I might psychologically fall into that, I think it's awful for anyone to think that way. Like the article way talking about I think time management is definetly the way to attack things. If you manage things out well, you're bound to be much more accepting of your work than becoming a perfectionist. I've been trying to do the same thing. I can never seem to time things out well which really hurts me later on a makes me fall into working for perfection. Knowing that huge company never think like that and is the reason they're successful is just one of the many reason I'm trying to get away from the perfectionist route and become more efficient.
This notion that perfection is the only way to complete a task is one that completely encompass the way our society thinks. It’s an idea that is ingrained into people from a very young age. I think this notion stems from the ides that to not be perfect is to fail; this idea is completely false. I agree with the point made in the article when it says that it is better to be good overall, than to be perfect in one thing and consequentially ignore other areas. Perfectionism makes you overall less successful. The notion behind perfectionism is the fear of failure. We are all afraid to fail, so therefore with the perfectionist attitude, it is considered failure when we produce work that is less than perfect. This attitude is what is holding back so many people from overall success; they might be successful in one area, but overall they are imperfect. For me, I believe that out of the ideas suggested in the article to break the perfectionist attitude, allotting time slots for certain tasks and sticking to that time slot would work the best for me personally.
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