In his 5-day Beyond Perfect Challenge that ended yesterday, the author Jon Acuff came up with a new definition for perfectionism that I would like to share with you today.

Perfectionism is creativity with misplaced focus on fear instead of hope.

This is how it operates:

• It avidly tries to protect us from failure and rejection and criticism.
• It worries we wouldn’t be able to handle them if they take place.
• It prevents us from starting new habits because then, it believes, we need to commit forever, which is impossible because life will get in the way, so why even start?
• It complicates our goals to make them more perfect, so they would become unachievable.
• It does not allow us to finish what we start because then we will need to show what we made to the world and get subjected to the above-mentioned failure or criticism.
• It makes us imagine what might go wrong, but rarely lets us imagine what if it goes right.
• It considers any achievement less than 100% as nothing.
• It compares our beginning to someone else’s middle.
• It causes us to burn out by believing perfect results are attainable.
• It makes us focus on outcomes we can’t control rather than our efforts which we can control.
• It believes in “the hard way or no way”.

This was some of what I learned from the generous information Jon shared in the challenge and from reading his book Finish . He’s offering a course and lifetime access to the challenge here if you are interested.