The Perfectionism Point

Perfectionism kills productivity. It’s the archenemy of progress. It will assassinate your ability to get things done without you ever even knowing it. Perfectionism hides in the cloak of good intentions. The things we tell ourselves certainly make sense to us, after all, we are our own greatest salesman, selling ourselves on our opinions and thoughts. We can convince ourselves that our inaction is a means to make sure we “get it right.” The only problem is our excuses to take action becomes the very limits we live under.

Nothing will slow you down more than overthinking and overplanning. The famous phrase, “The Paralysis of Analysis” is a profound concept that plagues many people. If you wait to do something until you can do everything, you won’t do anything.

In the late 1800s, Poet Katherine Craster wrote a famous poem called, The Centipede Dilemma. This later become a psychology phenomenon taught as The Centipede Effect:

A centipede was happy – quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.

Katherine’s poem opened our eyes to the challenge we all face when it comes to overthinking. Always planning is a sure way to keep yourself safe from actually stepping out. We all struggle with this to some degree. You have to know your perfectionism point. Your perfectionism point is the critical moment when you cross over from planning to overplanning, working to overworking, thinking to overthinking. It’s the tipping point from when you should take action, but you keep making excuses in hopes to make it better. There is nothing wrong with wanting to produce high-quality work, the problem is your mind will hack you and try to convince you nothing is ever good enough. Author Brene Brown said, “Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be our best. Perfectionism is not about healthy achievement and growth; it’s a shield.”

Instead of making things better, you are actually overworking it causing it to potentially get worse. Successful people are the ones who started with what they had and made it better over time. Nothing starts off perfectly. Rather, it’s the process of refining that things are perfected. You see, you can’t improve a result until you first get a result. It’s the initial outcome that gives you the insight to learn and grow to a better result in the future.