Perfectionism

There was an article by Benedict Carey in the New York Times a couple of days ago about perfectionism that got me thinking. The article cited a few recent studies that suggest the dangers of extreme perfectionism on your mental health – striving too hard to succeed at everything can lead to stress, depression, and even obsessive-compulsive disorder, substance abuse issues, and eating disorders.

In one awesome-sounding study, participants were asked to “slack off” at work – doing only what was required of them (not staying late, not putting huge amount of time into projects, etc.). To their surprise, their lower amounts of effort didn’t lead to losing their job or any other related unhappiness.

On one hand, I embrace this article. Slacking off at work is one of the things in my life that I am trying to, for the lack of a better word, perfect. I don’t come in early or leave late. I don’t think about work issues outside of the office, I don’t go the extra mile. And it was hard to get to the point in slacking that I have reached – naturally, I want to do a good job and be better at what I do than anyone else. I didn’t realize that it would be a waste of my energy and time to excel at being a office monkey.

But on the other hand, I don’t care about my work. It isn’t essential to my happiness. On the contrary, work is something that it is essential for me not to worry about in order to be happy. I do care about other aspects of my life – let’s say having a strong relationship with my boyfriend, friends and family, taking care of myself, writing. And this is where the difference lies: while it’s vital to not strive to be perfect at everything, I find it just as vital to my self-worth and self-confidence to strive to be perfect at the few passions in my life.

The danger in the article, I think, is that most people think that they are perfectionists. As often as I hear, “I’m such a perfectionist!” I rarely hear, “I’m a half-assed kind of person. I can’t stop myself from doing a shoddy, slap-dash job!” Sure, there is a small minority of people who struggle with the mental side effects of too much perfectionism, but most of us, including me, are displaying normal and healthy amounts of striving. Let’s hope no one is getting the simple message of “I should slack off more” from the article when the answer is more complicated than that.

In graduate school, the writers who struggled most were, ironically, the ones who settled. Writers who were happy with the products they created generally didn’t advance – there was no reason to, since they were content with their current skill level. The best writers were the self-critical ones who hated their own words moments after writing them. The people who improved the most were the ones who kept raising the bar on themselves.

Of course, too much perfectionism can be paralyzing for writing as well. It’s one thing to hate the words you’ve just wrote and quite another to hate the words before you’ve written them and then write nothing at all – it can be self-defeating. I think the last sentence of the article explained the issue best: “If you can’t tolerate your worst, at least every once in a while, how true to yourself can you be?” Tolerence is key.

It’s a matter, perhaps, of striving to be perfect while understanding that being perfect is not always a viable goal. I will try to write as well as Nabokov, and I won’t give up, but I also understand that it won’t happen. As some Roman philosopher whom I can’t recall, a bunch of motivational speakers, and Ziggy like to say, “Shoot for the moon – if you miss, you will land among the stars.”  

Like so many things, the middle road looks to be the best. Don’t try to be the best at things you aren’t that passionate about; strive to be the best that you can at the few things in life that matter to you. I know what I’ll be doing over the next weeks and months – trying to get to work exactly 15 minutes late, taking extra bathroom breaks right up to the point before a higher authority notices, cutting corners wherever I can locate corners, and giving exactly 50%. I will be the most perfectly mediocre office assistant the world will have ever seen! Hold on, moon, I’m coming!

You can read the original NYT article here.

A Case of the Mondays

There’s something deeply heartbreaking about returning to work on the Monday after a vacation. It’s a lot like the Monday before you went on vacation, except that there’s no longer anything to look forward to. Even Christmas, which is only a month away, is ruined by the fact that my new workplace duties and responsibilities (paired with my current paycheck and title) start on the first of January.

I’m going to guess that the feeling – the Monday-after feeling – is created because during our string of days away from work, we forget the crappy things that we’ve gotten used to – our familiar daily routine. Perhaps before Thanksgiving I had almost unknowingly resigned myself to a life of spreadsheets and faking smiles but now, after five days of gravy-filled freedom, spreadsheets seem impossible to return to. You know, I feel like an abused kid who isn’t that upset about his childhood until the moment he discovers what he’s been missing out on: candy, go-carts, love.

Today made me wonder: is work usually this bad, or does it seem worse because yesterday I watched five hours of football and ate four different kinds of meat? I’m not sure. As I read an email from my boss informing me that my new second boss, whose wanton use of emoticons I find unsettling, would be calling me to teach me how to “do totals in Excel,” I wasn’t quite so sure. Perhaps today was a perfect storm of things I hate. Perhaps I hate way, way too many things. Perhaps, in exchange for learning something I already know – namely, how to “do totals in Excel,” I could teach my new boss the word “sum.”

On the other hand, my job paid for that Thanksgiving gravy, and for the apartment that sheltered me, and for the cable that allowed me to watch a Lifetime Movie Network marathon that included Too Young to be a Dad and The Truth About Jane. These facts lead me to believe that my job is a necessary evil in my life and, therefore, something that should be ignored to the very best of my ability.

I think I’ve taken some important steps toward this goal of apathy and sliding by in my passionless job, but I’d like to cover more and more ground in the weeks and months to come – it’s actually surprisingly hard to let go of competitiveness and perfectionism and drive. And I’d of course be thrilled if you’d like to join me as long as you have a job where you are treated kind of like a really high-end photocopying machine.

My first step is to stop checking my work email from home under any circumstances. I’ve just trashed the link to the Outlook site on my home computer. I won’t give any more time to work beyond the hours that I am paid for – no extra time at work and no extra time thinking or reading about work. And if you’re thinking that you’d get fired if you stopped staying late or if you didn’t check your messages at night, I think you better start looking for a different crappy job from the one you’ve got.

In summation, tomorrow’s Tuesday – the day that’s exactly like Monday except for the fact that you’re less rested and that you don’t have to give a one-sentence summary of your weekend to everyone who politely asks so that they can then talk about theirs. I’m going to try to go in to work an embrace my totally mediocre and apathetic attitude. And I’m really, really excited about doing an outstanding job at it.