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.
