A Shot At Perfectionism

Friday, April 27th, 2007 10:28am

Since I work with perfectionists and am not one myself, I was drawn to Penelope Trunk’s latest article – Breaking the Perfection Habit. Let’s just jump into it:

Here are the reasons I can’t stand perfectionists:

€¢ Perfectionists procrastinate because they’re scared of not being perfect.
€¢ Perfectionists are hypercritical to the point that they can’t support people around them.
€¢ Perfectionists can’t finish a project because they can always think of a way to improve it.
€¢ Perfectionists are phony, because no one’s perfect and they can’t handle showing that in themselves.

Well, that is direct, isn’t it? I harass one of our perfectionists for always making a left turn in a project when it is close to being completed – the third point sums that approach up succinctly.

I can’t top this:

2. You do better work if you aren’t worried about perfection.
Here’s a story I heard from Alexander Kjerulf, who was talking about David Bayles’s book “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking“:
A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. All those on the right would be graded solely on their works’ quality.
His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group; 50 pound of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A.
At grading time, the works with the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.
Think about this in your own life, even if you’re not using clay. The more you practice, the better you’ll get. But you can’t practice if you think only of perfection. Practice is about making mistakes; perfection comes from imperfection.

Read the whole thing.