【The School Of Life】完美主义的问题 The Problem With Perfectionism

Perfectionism is the unreasonable and self-defeating ambition of getting something absolutely right, which makes us difficult to be around and punishing to live within. The origins of perfectionism lie in the imagination, in the ease with which we can conjure up a picture of an ideal state of affairs, compared with the monstrous difficulty of bringing such a state into being by ourselves. The sickness of perfectionism gestates in the fertile gap between our noble visions and our mediocre reality. And yet our problems do not ultimately arise just in our love of perfection. They lie in our reckless tendencies to under-budget for the difficulties of achieving perfection. The proper target for gentle criticism is premature perfectionism. How accurately we budget for time and effort is always dependent on a proper grasp of the inherent difficulty of any task. If we fully recognise something to be exceptionally difficult, we don't panic when our first efforts are weak and progress slow. It's difficult, but we knew it would be. High standards only become a problem when we think something might and should be substantially easier than it turns out to be – and when we read our struggles as marks of our own ineptitude rather than as an inevitable part of a legitimately lengthy journey. Perfectionism is only a problem because we have under-budgeted for difficulty, not because we are aiming high. It strikes when we imagine we might write a good novel in six months or have a good career by the age of 30 or have worked out spontaneously how to have a successful marriage. Our perfectionism starts to torture us when we lack information on how hard others had to work and how much they had to suffer before reaching their ideas of perfection. In a better world, culture would endlessly draw to our attention the first drafts and hidden labours of other people and properly alert us to the true horrors exacted by anything worth doing. We would not then be so impatient and such sickly perfectionists. We would be patient, resilient questers for excellence. The problem isn't that we're aiming for perfection. It's that we don't have an accurately redemptive idea of what perfection really demands. At the School of Life, we believe in developing emotional intelligence. To that end, we've also created a whole range of products to support that growth. Find out more at the link on the screen now.