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Most perfectionists can’t see their standards are unrealistic and bad for them. To find if you’re a perfectionist, ask yourself if your standards:
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The more you chase perfectionism, the more likely you are to procrastinate and then get stressed out when things don’t go exactly how you wanted them to.
Research even indicates that even when perfectionists get higher salaries, they are more unhappy with their work.
In sports, the drive for perfectionism is a positive force and turn setbacks into opportunities to reflect, learn, and adjust your approach. But regular perfectionists keep revisiting past failures as a form of self-condemnation.
All this does is cause them to raise the bar even higher, increasing the likelihood of failure. Try to see failure as simply a launching place for success, so you can break away from perfectionism.
To feel comfortable with the uncomfortable:
Run a small experiment where you either purposefully stop early or give yourself hard limits on your work. So you have an opportunity to disprove your perfectionistic beliefs.
Not only will this help you get over your own perfectionism, but it can also highlight places where your effort is better spent.
If a project is at 90%, you’re asking for line-level feedback like typos, glitches, or silly mistakes. At 30%, the reviewer skips over those things (assuming they’ll be looped in later to help with them) and focuses on the broader strokes: structure, strategy, approach.
Using this technique can help curb the socially-prescribed perfectionism in the workplace. It also makes your managers more aware of the status of your projects, and thus less likely to pile more on you.
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Perfectionists tend to keep tweaking their work endlessly. To counter that, you can create a checklist for each task.
With a checklist that reminds you to confirm what you’ve done, you needn’t endlessly slog. You’re following a process with discrete and measurable goals.
People who are concerned about perfection often have a hard time getting started.
They’re stressed about doing things perfectly, they feel paralyzed to get started, and their work suffers. This can also stop them from trying new things, taking risks, and can suppress their ability to innovate.
Before you start a task, write out the maximum you could do for that task, the minimum you could do, and the moderate–a happy medium of the two.
This allows you to break black-and-white thinking and helps you move forward.