Perfectionism
Perfectionism is the drive to make things as good as they possibly can be.
At first glance, it seems like this would be advantageous, spurring someone to achieve great accomplishments, which it can. Upon closer inspection, however, it is just as profoundly debilitating, if not moreso, as it becomes all but impossible for the individual in question to consider any of those great achievements complete and worth releasing into the world.
The perfectionist makes things better than anyone unencumbered by such a temperament, and yet oftentimes sits on them, considering them unworthy of public consumption.
Perfectionism would seem to cluster with autism and perhaps ADHD, conspiring to produce people who work alone, ignore received wisdom, work things out for themselves from first principles, make things finer than anyone else, then neglect to show them to anybody.
The completion of even the most minor projects can be put off indefinitely, for want of making the most trivial of choices. (I myself have written many articles that are almost finished, save for the most trivial of details, which are holding them back from publishing, against all reason.)
As with ADHD equally tugging you in countless directions at once, perfectionism can lead to you amassing a wealth of promising yet incomplete and ultimately abandoned projects.
This perfectionism can be just as debilitating when externalised. You inevitably end up doing other people's jobs for them (regardless of their relative social standing), so that they're finally done well enough.
At work, you might end up redoing the tasks haphazardly completed by your co-workers, your boss, or your employees, just so it's good enough to integrate with your own contributions. At home, you might refuse to delegate any work to tradespeople, such as electricians and plumbers, as in your experience they similarly don't do a good enough job. It's like no-one else cares enough.
You're constantly disappointed by things other people have made, and habitually return products as not sufficiently well manufactured. Making even an insignificant purchase can involve days, weeks, or even months of research, trials, returns, and refunds.
When you occasionally find a sufficiently well-designed and well-built product — perhaps a particularly well-thought-out piece of stationery made to especially exacting standards — you're likely to stockpile it.
You end up drowning in the sea of mediocrity which everyone else happily wades through, seemingly unware of its myriad shortcomings. Nothing you do is ever good enough, and nothing anyone else does is good enough, either.
Having perfectionism is not desirable.
Quotes
[The world's finest clock] H-2... won full backing from the Society: "And the Result of these Experiments, is this; that (as far as can be determined without making a voyage to sea) the motion is sufficiently regular and exact, for finding the Longitude of a Ship within the nearest Limits proposed by Parliament and probably much nearer."
But it wasn't good enough for [its inventor] Harrison. The same vicelike conviction that led him to his finest innovations — along his own lines of thinking, without regard for the opinions of others — rendered him deaf to praise. What did it matter what the Royal Society thought of H-2, if its mechanism did not pass muster with him?
— Dava Sobel, Longitude, 1995[1]
We did about two years preproduction. We built up a massive great archive of Poland, the concentration camps, everything. And while we were doing this two years' worth of background research, of course Steven Spielberg came along, researched, shot, edited, and released Schindler's List, which, as Stanley said, would have been a hard act to follow, so that was then abandoned.
— Tony Frewin, Stanley Kubrick's Boxes, 2008[2]
See also
References
- Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time Dava Sobel, 1995, ISBN 0-14-025879-5, pp. 74—87
- Stanley Kubrick's Boxes Jon Ronson, 2008
Traits: Arithmomania | Perfectionism
Perfectionists: Stanley Kubrick
