Everywhere I go, but especially in educational settings, I’ve found it increasingly common to hear that people should constantly be striving for perfection. With the overwhelming pressure to earn a high GPA, take as many APs as possible, and attend your “dream school,” it’s no wonder so many students have adopted the perfectionist mindset. But I’ve often wondered if this mentality is truly the most productive and sustainable way to live. Should we really seek to be perfect all the time?
Of course, perfectionism has its upsides: it cultivates your work ethic, encourages you to try your absolute hardest, and allows you to live up to your fullest potential. The characteristic detail-oriented persona it’s associated with promotes the idea of working hard for the sake of being thorough as opposed to simply finishing the job. There’s also an element of pride involved, as doing well in anything will make you feel accomplished and encourage you to set the bar even higher for yourself in the future. In this way, perfectionism motivates you to achieve more every time you try, fueling a constant cycle of improvement and self-confidence.
Still, there exists a fine line between leveraging perfectionism as a tool to achieve excellence and allowing it to overstate your expectations for yourself. The perfectionist mentality, when taken to an extreme, allows little room for mistakes and growth, and by constantly trying to be perfect and refusing to accept anything less, you leave yourself vulnerable to the guilt of an inevitable perceived failure in the future. Though it’s important to set high standards for yourself and adhere to those standards, there’s always the risk of allowing mere goals to morph into unrealistic ambitions and burnout, simply from putting too much pressure on yourself and attaching too much of your pride and self-worth to your success in one area. It’s impossible to do everything well at once, which is why it’s critically important to step back and evaluate your priorities before finding yourself completely caught up in all the extra tasks a perfectionist’s ideals might make you put on yourself.
Thus, the border between perfectionism and an outright fear of failure is especially precarious. While it’s important to establish a high standard for the quality of work we’re willing to be satisfied with, we also have to consider our own limitations. It seems there will always be too many things to do and never enough time to do them, and unfortunately, there are some tasks we will simply never get to. So perhaps the solution is not to give up perfectionism entirely, but to consider every part of our lives and make a clear decision as to which ones deserve our full perfectionist’s attention. This way, we can avoid spreading ourselves too thin, focusing more on the things that matter and less on the things that don’t.