Declare War on Perfectionism!

Raise your hand if you think perfectionism is a good thing.

If you are raising your hand right now, I've got bad news and I've got worse news. The bad news is that your colleagues are starting to wonder why you are staring at your computer with your hand up, so put your hand down.

The worse news is: you're wrong. To use a classic SAT analogy: Perfectionism is to Success as Oyster Sauce is to Delicious Fudge Brownies.

The former is not an ingredient for the latter.

Perfectionism is a cruel trick that your mind plays on you that can have one of two results: Inferiority or Hopelessness.

If you are the type of perfectionist who works unyieldingly hard to try to make things exactly so but then suffers needlessly when your efforts don't yield the precise desired results, welcome to the inferiority brand of perfectionism.

On the other hand, if you are the type of perfectionist who stops engaging in activities because they don't seem to be going exactly as you imagined, you are in the hopelessness camp. This means that you tend to avoid what you really want to be doing - perhaps you are avoiding something right now, while you are reading this article - with the justification, "It's not going to be perfect, so, I might as well not even try." Unfortunately, when the temporary distraction lets up, you are left in despair because you are further from your goal than if you even tried to make progress.

Of course, most perfectionists have it both ways: They either feel inferior one moment because they haven't achieved exactly what they set out to do or they feel hopeless the next because they have been avoiding their projects altogether.

The time has come to declare war on perfectionism. If you approach life with unrealistic expectations you are certain to be let down. You won't get much done, and even if you do, you certainly won't appreciate it.

The antidote to perfectionism is practicalism - is that a word? Microsoft Word doesn't seem to think so, but we're making it a word, right here, right now. If you can approach your love life, your friendships, your work, your world as creative process rather than like studying for a test you will be far better off. Doing something, anything, is an accomplishment. If you can get close to your vision, wonderful, but if you can't, don't despair: Engage enough to move things forward, but don't invest your entire well being in your results.

So stop reading this article and go to it. Kick perfectionism where it hurts and make the progress you can. You'll be happy you did.