Perfectionism - Can it lead to be unproductive?

You can often hear someone say with pride: "I am a perfectionist", they say, look, I am doing everything perfectly. In fact, there is nothing to be proud of. If we are not talking about light perfectionism, when you are pleased with geometrically perfectly laid out napkins on the table, but about a painful desire to achieve perfection in any business, from ironing socks to writing a canvas in the Da Vinci style, then this is a sure way to reduce productivity ...

It would seem that people who strive to do everything perfectly should be more successful in work and life. But in practice, it is perfectionists who are the most inveterate procrastinators and lazy people. Why is this happening? Let's figure it out:

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“The main attention is to the main things” - all self-development systems bequeathed to us. But the perfectionist is not able to ignore the little things and devotes the same amount of time and attention to everything he does, in vain attempts to bring any little thing to perfect execution.

Since you want to do everything perfectly, it is much more difficult to tackle it. The burden of responsibility for the quality of performance is so pressing that it is easier to postpone performance until later. It is the perfectionists who push things back because “the mood is not right” or “I’m tired” or “it won’t work out as perfectly now as I can do if I feel well”.

It may sound paradoxical, but it is the perfectionists who have the biggest mess at home, because it takes ten times longer to get perfect cleanliness than normal order. Knowing how difficult it is to do such cleaning, people prone to perfectionism prefer not to take it up at all.

The dynamic world dictates its own rules that run counter to the desire to do everything perfectly. Now “half-baked” products and projects are being launched on the market, which are finished on the fly with the help of feedback and eventually take off. Perfectionists can't do that. While they are trying to create the perfect product, other people make fortunes with raw but relevant ideas.

Learning by doing is another effective way to develop in today's realities, and it is precisely this that is not available to perfectionists. They prefer not at all to take on what they do not know how to do, or to drop out of training after the first attempts, feeling acute dissatisfaction with the results of their experiments.

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A commandment that ruined many ideas and projects. When a normal person has a revolutionary idea, but does not have the skills to implement it, it does not stop him, he learns and does. The perfectionist, on the other hand, most likely will not do at all, because he knows that it will not work out perfectly.

Psychic energy is as much an exhaustible resource as time or money. You can spend it on a fuse of inspiration and do something cool, or you can use it to self-flagellate and feel guilty for not performing your duties perfectly. Only you can decide what to spend your own energy on.

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