One of my favorite blogs, Mindhacks, has a post about perfectionism and depression. An article from the Boston Globe is quoted.
“Perfectionism is a phobia of mistake-making,” said Jeff Szymanski, executive director of the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation, which is based in Boston. “It is the feeling that ‘If I make a mistake, it will be catastrophic.’ ”
Striving for perfection is fine, said Smith College psychology professor Randy Frost, a leading researcher on perfectionism. The issue is how you interpret your own inevitable mistakes and failings. Do they make you feel bad about yourself in a global sense? Does a missed shot in tennis make you slam your racket to the ground? Do you think anything less than 100 percent might as well be zero?
I think this is a somewhat superficial interpretation of perfectionism. Its too easy to say that someone is a perfectionist because they are afraid of making mistakes. De Gustibus. I think the deeper source of perfectionism is more subtle and also easier to rehabilitate.
Ironically, perfectionists are not people who have high standards. Instead, I think a perfectionist is someone who doesn’t trust his own judgement. There is only one way to do something perfectly, but there are infintely many ways to do it imperfectly. Sacrificing perfection means making a decision about which imperfection to allow. So striving for perfection is just a cover for shrinking from decision.
On the other hand, people who are comfortable with imperfection are people who know what works. People who lack confidence in their judgement of what works insist on perfectionism because that covers all the bases. And these people never get the opportunity to learn what works because their perfectionism prevents them from experimenting.
Of course perfection is usually impossible but what happens in this case to the perfectionist is that their final product is what’s left when they give up rather than what they carefully planned. This usually doesn’t work and this further deteriorates the perfectionist’s confidence in his ability to do the second-best.
Cheap Talk 
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April 9, 2009 at 8:44 am
pcyu
Assuming that the success of a person depends on how his contemporaries perceive him. We could interpret prefectionists as people who lack the confidence in other people’s judgement. Perfectionists are the way they are not because of their own inability to make sacrifices, but because others, who are not knowledgable enough to understand those sacrifices, interpret those them as a sign of incompetence.
April 9, 2009 at 11:32 am
donna
I think you misunderstand perfectionists. It is more than just high standards, it is that even doing the very best you can, if you miss the mark, you fear criticism. It comes from growing up with an overly demanding parent. I called it the “four As and a B tape” growing up. The response was always “Why did you get a B?” not “What a great report card!”. Enough of that, and you will not only fear making mistakes, you will know whatever you do will never, ever be good enough. pcyu is closer to right. Most perfectionists know for themselves when they have done all they can, but just know others will criticize it anyway.
Eventually it becomes, “If I can’t do it perfectly, why bother” which leads to procrastinating, which always gives you the excuse that you didn’t have enough time to do it right. And then, finally, to resignation, where you stop bothering to try at all. At that point, hopefully, one can recover. But not until then.
As a recovered perfectionist, I can assure you for most perfectionists it is not a lack of confidence in themselves. It is that they are simply tired of trying to live up to an impossible to meet standard.
April 9, 2009 at 4:49 pm
p
donna – out of curiosity – how did you recover from your perfectionism?
November 16, 2009 at 11:06 am
amanda
Nice blog. You might enjoy reading “Whack-a-Mole: The Price We Pay For Expecting Perfection.”