While trying to start writing this article, I found myself thinking about all the sentences I could use to make this text seem perfect right from the first words. Well, I believe you have certainly done the same thing. Reflecting on it, how many times have you done that in your own hobbies, daily activities, or assigned tasks?
This friction between intention and execution has reached an all-time high. Wanting to do your best is usually considered a good thing — in fact, it’s an efficient way to keep pursuing evolution in all aspects of your life. But what happens when “doing your best” becomes “anything less than perfect is failure”?
Being a perfectionist isn’t the same as wanting to succeed
There is a huge difference between the pursuit of excellence and the need to be perfect. It is all about how we deal with our own standards. Striving for success means setting high goals and wanting to improve ourselves to achieve them. Throughout this process, it is healthy to understand that making mistakes is part of it and, more importantly, an essential aspect of growth.
When it comes to perfectionism, however, mistakes can feel like something that doesn’t even belong in the vocabulary. Poor results may be interpreted as personal failures, leading to less motivation and turning goals into a source of validation.
In a conversation with the psychologist Laura Maia, it becomes possible to understand how those high goals can become unmotivating. “It is an illusion that never allows us to feel satisfied. It is a pursuit that you will never truly reach”, she explains. “You may convince yourself that you have achieved it for a moment, but it ultimately creates a great deal of anxiety and leaves you constantly dissatisfied.”
High standards can stop being motivating when the fear of failure becomes greater than the desire to achieve. This is when anxiety — the fear of disappointing others, being seen as a failure, or simply not doing enough — gets in the way. What was once meant to stimulate growth can instead leave us paralyzed, cause us to procrastinate, or even make us quit.
“Procrastinating or putting off tasks can become a form of self-deception, a way of relieving the immediate feeling of guilt. If I don’t trust myself and my self-esteem is low, I start believing that I simply can’t do it”, Laura mentions.
When did hobbies stop being fun?
This extreme pursuit of perfection is not limited to work or studies; sometimes, it follows us into the activities we engage in simply for pleasure.
“First of all, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves today. We are constantly expected to produce, achieve, and make money. Our era has instilled this idea in our minds to an excessive degree,” the psychologist says.
Have you ever wondered why you stopped painting just a few days after starting, or why you couldn’t take piano lessons seriously? Consider this: has that imperfect performance affected your self-esteem?
By definition, a hobby is a regular activity done for fun and relaxation during one’s free time, something separate from work or academics, solely for the pure joy of doing it. However, perfectionists struggle to relax and simply engage in an activity, even a hobby, without the pressure of achieving an ideal outcome.
“When this pressure becomes excessive, it can turn our hobbies into obligations and we start complicating a life that could be simple…”, she says.
What once began as curiosity, slowly turned into performance. A hobby that once offered an escape from pressure became another area where we measure ourselves, compare our progress, and feel frustrated when we don’t meet our own expectations.
No room left to be a beginner – and social media isn’t helping
“Social media creates this idea of an idealized life. Idealization and perfectionism both exist in the world of ideas, in the Platonic world,” Laura explains.
Social media can make perfection feel not only desirable but normal. We are constantly exposed to carefully selected versions of other people’s lives, making it easy to forget that what we see is rarely the whole picture.
So, before deciding to give up piano lessons, you might have come across a post of someone playing flawlessly — something that only a professional could pull off. Then, your mind takes a shortcut, leading you to believe that if you don’t reach that level of “perfection,” it isn’t worth continuing.
Those lives exposed in the media makes us believe that, instead of simply enjoying what we are doing, we should wonder whether we are doing enough, achieving enough, or progressing fast enough.
Laura explains that misunderstanding social media as a way to inspire us and broaden our minds, rather than something to be imitated, can somehow damage our self-esteem. “By creating these idealized goals, ones that we will never reach, we remain trapped in an endless search, which is an endless sense of lack.” She also adds: “This is how we become afraid to try, because we believe we have to be perfect, just like the person or the work we saw online.”
Progress over perfection
The fear of not being good at something can keep us from discovering whether, over time, we could become good at it.
There is a multitude of incredible hobbies, activities, and experiences we could have enjoyed if we had allowed ourselves to be beginners. And by “being a beginner,” I mean not being good at the start, remaining curious, and working toward improvement.
“We need to work on our sense of internal satisfaction. We often feel that we are falling short of what we could be. And while there is always room for improvement, in this case, the problem is excessive self-criticism,” the psychologist emphasizes.
After all, it is possible to set ambitious goals and earnestly pursue growth without turning every slip-up into proof that you aren’t good enough. Recognize that we are not someone else, nor are we better than them, and that we still have a lot to improve, can creates a sense of satisfaction and pleasure in our own lives.
Perfection may well be the absence of errors, but progress is what happens precisely because we make them. And it is progress that sustains constant growth and development.
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The article above was edited by Isabella Scaramucci.
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