For some reason I’m not perfect. Oh wait - that’s it, being perfect is impossible.
The textbook definition of perfectionism describes a “refusal to accept any standard short of perfection“. Wikipedia quotes the more relaxed neo-Aristotelean Thomas Hurka:
This moral theory starts from an account of the good life, or the intrinsically desirable life. And it characterizes this life in a distinctive way. Certain properties, it says, constitute human nature or are definitive of humanity—they make humans human. The good life, it then says, develops these properties to a high degree or realizes what is central to human nature. Different versions of the theory may disagree about what the relevant properties are and so disagree about the content of the good life. But they share the foundational idea that what is good, ultimately, is the development of human nature.
It follows that perfectionists do not believe that they can attain a perfect life but rather strives towards some definition of perfection or ‘good life’.
So where did these two definitions come from? The former seems to be a perversion of the latter. And they can be categorised as psychological (an attitude) and philosophical (an approach) respectively.
I’d like to propose that the attitude is neither valid nor helpful, whilst the approach is both of these things. On the one hand perfection is useful to stretch ourselves by aiming for close to what we call perfect. On the other hand we should never measure our success against it - after all, since actually being perfect and obtaining perfection is impossible, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
I’ve discovered perfectionism to be a surprisingly nasty ailment. The attitude of everything having to be perfect rapidly leads to not starting things unless one is confident of success. As tasks become more complex this confidence is harder and harder to find. So perfectionism can be paralysing in actually doing anything at all.
The only way out, it seems, is to change the way in which success is measured - adopting a mantra that contradicts perfectionism by seeing ‘always room for improvement’ as a good thing - what’s more, the worse you are at something, the easier it is to improve!