It's late, and you're rewording the same email for the fourth time. Nobody asked for it to be perfect. Something in you did.
When forty years of findings on perfectionism at work, from 95 separate investigations, were pooled, the result surprised the team that did it. Perfectionists were more motivated, more engaged and put in longer hours. Their job performance showed no clear gain. What they did have was more burnout, more stress, more anxiety and more depression.
So the extra effort bought them little at work and cost them plenty in stress and health. That sounds like an argument for lower standards. It's an argument for a different kind.
High standards come in two flavours, and only one of them hurts. Ahead: the two kinds and how to tell which one you've got, why the harmful kind makes you put things off, how fast it's spreading, and seven ways to keep the bar high without paying for it.
Two kinds of high standards
The first kind is striving: you set a high bar because you care about the work and enjoy getting it right. The second kind is concern: you set a high bar because you're afraid of what happens if you miss it, and every mistake feels like a verdict on you.
On their own, the strivings tend to come with good things: motivation, conscientiousness and satisfaction. They stay healthy as long as mistakes and other people's opinions stay in proportion. The concerns are where the damage starts. Katherine Morgan Schafler's makes the case for keeping the drive and losing the dread.
Here is a quick test. When you finish something good, do you feel pleased, or just relieved you got away with it? Pleasure points to striving. Relief points to fear.
The fear kind has a famous companion. In 1978, the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes named the impostor phenomenon: high achievers who feel their success is a fluke and fear being found out. When 25 sets of findings with more than 12,000 people were pooled, impostor feelings went strongly with perfectionistic concerns, and only weakly with striving.
What fear of mistakes costs you
Burnout is the first bill. When the findings from 43 investigations with nearly 10,000 people were pooled, perfectionistic concerns went with medium-to-large increases in burnout. Striving on its own went with slightly less burnout. In some cases the pattern was worse at work than in sport or school.
The second bill is procrastination. People high in perfectionistic concerns put things off more. People high in striving put things off less. The fear of doing it badly makes starting feel dangerous, so you polish the plan, read up a bit more, and the deadline creeps closer.
Then comes the decision you never make. People who always need the best possible option were less happy, less optimistic and more prone to regret than people who settled on a good choice and moved on. At work, that's the report rewritten five times and the job offer weighed for a month.
It shows up in careers directly. Graduating students who hunted for the best possible job landed starting salaries about 20% higher than students happy with a good one, and felt worse about the jobs they got, with more stress all through the search. Barry Schwartz, who worked on both, lays it out in . Voltaire put the old Italian proverb into verse in 1772: "The best is the enemy of the good."
The economist Herbert Simon had a name for the alternative. In 1956 he blended "satisfy" and "suffice" into satisficing: choosing the first option that clears your bar, and moving on.
Leonardo da Vinci is the patron saint of the endless polish. He never handed the Mona Lisa to the family who commissioned it. By Giorgio Vasari's account he "lingered over it four years" and "left it unfinished", and he may still have been working on it as late as 1517.
Paul Valéry described the type in 1933. For "lovers of perfection", he wrote, a work is never finished, only abandoned.
The last bill is your health. In 450 older adults followed for six and a half years, high perfectionism went with a higher risk of dying, while conscientiousness went with a lower one. Being careful and organised went with a longer life. Being a perfectionist went with a shorter one.
Long hours raise the risk too. Across 25 sets of findings with more than 600,000 people, those working 55 hours a week or more had a third higher risk of stroke than those working a standard 35 to 40. Japan has a word for the extreme: karōshi, death from overwork, first reported in 1969 after a 29-year-old newspaper worker died of a stroke.
Why it's getting worse
Perfectionism is rising. Across 164 samples of more than 41,000 American, Canadian and British students tested between 1989 and 2016, all three kinds went up. The biggest rise was in the feeling that other people demand perfection from you.
That's the fear kind, and it arrives from outside: the performance review, the social feed, the sense that the people around you all have it together.
Part of it starts at home. Across two large analyses, students who saw their parents as expecting a lot and criticising hard scored higher on perfectionism, most strongly on the feeling that others demand it. Between 1989 and 2019, students reported their parents' expectations and criticism rising year on year.
Keep the bar, lose the fear
Decide where excellence matters. Pick the two or three pieces of work each week where the quality makes a real difference, and give those your best. For everything else, set a "good enough" line before you start and stop when you reach it.
The quality pioneer Joseph Juran called the work that matters most the vital few. He borrowed the idea from the economist Vilfredo Pareto, who found that about 80% of Italy's land belonged to 20% of its people, and applied it to work: most problems come from a small share of causes.
Show it early. Share a rough version with someone whose judgement you trust before you've polished it. Their feedback at 60% saves you the hours you'd have spent perfecting the wrong thing. The fear says asking makes you look weak. People who asked for advice were judged more competent, especially when the task was hard and they asked the person directly.
A small mistake can even help. When a top performer fumbled and spilled a drink over himself, listeners liked him more. When an average performer did the same, they liked him less. Competence earns you room to be human.
We also judge our own wobbles harshly and other people's kindly. Across seven tests, people saw their own asking for help or showing an imperfection as weakness, and the same act by someone else as courage.
Treat a mistake as information. After a failure, people who were encouraged to go easy on themselves studied longer for the next test than people given a pep talk about how clever they were. Kindness keeps you working. Harshness makes you hide. For perfectionists it matters even more: in teenagers and adults alike, self-compassion weakened the link between perfectionism and depression.
Then take the lesson on purpose. People learned less from being told they were wrong than from being told they were right, because the sting makes the mind tune out, yet they learned just as well from other people's mistakes. So look at your slip the way you'd look at a colleague's.
Forgive the delay, too. Students who forgave themselves for putting off revision for their first exam procrastinated less before the second one, and did better on it.
If you lead people, make mistakes safe to mention. In 51 work teams at a manufacturing company, teams where people felt safe owning up to problems learned more, and the learning showed in their performance.
A hospital showed what that safety looks like. In eight nursing units, the best-led teams recorded more drug errors, at first sight a bad sign. Their nurses felt safe to report mistakes. In the low-reporting units, staff described a harsh climate. One said: "Heads will roll."
Check whose standard it is. When the bar feels crushing, ask: who said it had to be this good? If the answer is a boss, ask them what "done" looks like. If the answer is an imagined crowd, you can let it go. That crowd notices far less than you think. Students who walked into a room in an embarrassing Barry Manilow T-shirt guessed that about half the people there would remember it. About a quarter did.
Switch off after work. Perfectionists take the job home in their heads. Across 91 groups with more than 38,000 employees, mentally switching off in free time went with less exhaustion, better sleep, more wellbeing and slightly better work. The people who invested most in their jobs found it hardest to switch off.
The extra hours buy less than they seem. In British munitions factories during the First World War, output kept pace with hours up to about 50 a week, then flattened. By one reading of the records, 70 hours produced little more than 56.
The fear kind can be unlearned. Across eight tests of structured psychological programmes, both the impossible standards and the worry about mistakes dropped by a large amount, and anxiety and low mood eased too. If it runs your life, structured help works.
This week, pick one task you've been polishing too long. Decide what "good enough" means, finish it to that line, and send it. If you're a parent, praise the effort and the fix, as well as the result.
High standards that work for you
"Perfect" comes from the Latin perficere, to do thoroughly, to finish. Long before it meant flawless, it meant done.
Care about the work, aim high on what matters, and let the rest be good enough. That's the kind of high standard that builds a career. The other kind, driven by fear of mistakes, only builds the hours.
In Japan, broken pottery is sometimes mended with gold. The art is called kintsugi, and it treats the crack as part of the bowl's story. Good work can carry a seam.
Start with the email you've been rewording. Good enough, today. Send it.
Think you're just not good enough? How to Rewire Your Brain and Change Limiting Beliefs — explains how beliefs about yourself form, and four steps to change one.
Harder on yourself than on anyone else? 10 Tips to Fall in Love with Yourself — self-compassion in ten everyday habits.
Know someone who rewrites every email three times? Send them this, and tell them it's good enough.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional. If your mood has been low for weeks or you're having thoughts of harming yourself, reach out for help today.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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