16 November 2024
Excellence versus Perfection
Hello and welcome back.
Without warning, early in my experience as a therapist, I realized one elephant in many of my therapeutic rooms, was perfectionism. Perfectionism is an elephant that engenders more rigid, frozen fear than fluid forward movement. As I understand perfectionism, it is almost always compensatory, that is, it begins as a cover-up for what is perceived to be a shameful deficit.
A frequently seen example concerns growing up with an ACE or Adverse Childhood Experience. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2024), list the following adversities that, to quality as ACEs must have been experienced prior to reaching 18 years of age.
As always (and I shun absolutes) there are two macroscopic responses to a situation. As Epictetus put it, you can grasp the right or wrong handle. As the wokusts would have it, you are a victim or an oppressor. As Carol Dweck put it, you can adopt a fixed or a growth mindset. I am all-in with Dweck, Epictetus, and others of good will who believe that people change with their experiences; some without reflection, some with full intention—this is a choice—in fact, the most fundamental of choices: to be fully awake or on cruise-control. I emphasize this choice-making because I do not want a person reading this list of ACEs to believe they are doomed; far from it, you are experienced and probably wiser than those who have had no such experiences. I experienced four of these, prior to 18, five by 20, but who’s counting?!
The APA defines perfectionism thus:
n. the tendency to demand of others or of oneself an extremely high or even flawless level of performance, in excess of what is required by the situation. It is associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health problems. —perfectionist adj., n.
Within that definition, there are four points worthy of analysis. Firstly, those feeling badly about themselves, who feel they can only compensate for their perceived inadequacy through perfect performances, apply this destructive standard, not only to themselves, but foist it upon others. This is the gift that just keeps on taking. It robs people of initiative (I’ll just fail anyway), well-spiritedness (I’ll just look stupid when I fail) and an entrepreneurial zest (I’m not risking that—I’ll look like an idiot).
Notice the phrase, perfect performances. There are two sins in that confidence-eating little phrase. First, perfect performances in music, drama, athletics, or taking the garbage cans to the curb are rarer than hen’s teeth (don’t ask). Perfect should be reserved for things like reaching the moon, a rocket returning to Earth with pinpoint accuracy…part of the toxicity of that word is that we take the utterly exceptional and apply it to scrubbing the dog droppings off of your walking boots. Now the latter does deserve close visual and olfactory attention, but excellence? Come-on, you’re not going to send those boots out for laboratory-standard disinfection, are you? No, because a utility sink, bit of soap, and a rinsible brush will do the trick nicely.
Where this stops being funny is when we get to the fourth point. Perfectionism, as I see it, can become quite obsessive i.e., I must get this absolutely right. The APA tells us that perfectionism is associated with eating disorders that kill one person every hour in the USA (Bulimia Project, 2024) accounting for over 10,000 lost souls per year for our southern neighbour alone. The APA also informs us that perfectionism is associated with depression and anxiety. These two are related to anxiety often leading to depression. Anecdotally i.e., without counting, I administer a depression test to most of my clients on each visit until they consistently score 2 or less. The last question on the PHQ-9 (the test I use) concerns suicidal ideation and/or self-harms. The higher a client’s perfectionism, the higher the likelihood of one or both of those appearing. To put it plainly, perfectionism kills while good enough fosters well-spiritedness.
The second point (from the definition above) worthy of discussion (yes, we’re doing them out of order, good enough?) is the what of perfectionism which tells us that adherence to this standard requires, no demands, extremely high or even flawless levels of performance. Imagine what you do to a child by insisting that good enough is not good enough. From the get-go, that kid is anxious because he becomes too self-conscious about how he appears. With that self-consciousness comes a lack of easy-going spontaneity because he’s always on the prowl for hazardous situations in which he fears he will be unable to deliver yet another extremely high or flawless performance.
I worry that there may be readers who say, Yes, Dan, but you admit you love excellence so doesn’t your elitism foster perfectionism? (If you’ll excuse a bit of self-congratulation, that’s an excellent question!) No, it doesn’t and here’s the difference. Elitism is nothing more (or less) than the recognition that in any field of endeavour, there will be those who excel and those who don’t. Elitists would (strongly) prefer to be treated by a doctor who has a consistent record of excellent results rather than one who was admitted to medical school because she met performance-free standards of admission.
If you’re into stats, you can rank all performances with respect to their distance from excellence. Here’s the point: people are blessedly individual. It’s a huge part of what makes life such an invigorating blast of joy. Asking your aspiring classical guitarist to leave his Sor piece alone in favour of a perfect showing as a grade 8 high jumper is madness. Unless your child is multiply talented—it happens—you are better to observe the British aphorism, horses for courses. That means we ain’t all high jumpers, classical guitarists, or carpenters. And while that’s a beautiful thing, it is an ugly thing to demand of yourself, your children, or your friends that they must do better than good enough—everywhere, every time. Such perfectionistic thinking is, as I have tried to demonstrate, in flagrant disregard of the reality that people are entirely individual. Save your best for what you value the most. And let it be good enough.
Significantly, the third point from the definition, also supports our horses-for-courses standard. The APA maintains, like Aristotle (if he’s not mentioned once per page, I’ve failed!) that performance standards are best evaluated based on individual situations i.e., perfectionism is in excess of what is required by the situation.
There are two further points, both form my beloved Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book II.1 (Barnes, 1995, pp. 1742-3). The first is that there are, broadly, two types of excellence, intellectual and ethical. Intellectual excellence comes of experience and time while ethical excellence comes of practice or, in Aristotle’s words, habit. What is of interest is that, at this point in his writing, Aristotle noted that habit, or more, can be substituted for the word moral, the synonym of ethical. That is, ethical excellence is morality, practiced and reflected upon.
Where that leaves us, in terms of perfectionism, is also addressed. Aristotle stated that, “…excellences we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing…” e.g., we become non-perfectionists by consistently practicing the acceptance of good enough (Barnes, op. cit.).
On closing, we will look at which factors, from our five lists, this discussion implicates.
Thank you for thinking and acting. More next week. Be well.
Summary
Sources Referenced:
American Psychological Association. (2024 10 November). APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/perfectionism
Barnes, J. (Ed.). (1995). The complete works of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation. Princeton University Press.
Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Ballantine Books.
Long, G. (Tr.). (1991). Epictetus’ Enchiridion. Prometheus Books.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2024, 10 November), Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). https://www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html
Very interesting and enlightening. I love the passion in this piece, Dan. It’s “perfect” (in this situation:-). Helpful for sure.
Thank you for reading and commenting, Gloria. Much appreciated. The passion probably comes from having spent so much time helping people let go of that pernicious grip.