How to Overcome Perfectionism?
Questioner: I want everything that I do to be perfect. Because of this, I end up procrastinating a lot of things and focus only on the minor ones that I can do almost perfectly and feel satisfied about. I am not happy about this tendency. How should I get out of this trap?
Acharya Prashant: No, you should be perfect in the perfect work. First of all, your choice of what you are doing needs to be perfect. If I make a very imperfect choice in the first place and pick up some trivial work to do and then excel in that trivia, what have I attained?
Excellence is important but in the right field. What will you do by excelling in, let’s say, hunting rats? A fellow might say, “I am the world’s best rat hunter.” Some talent show will come and pick you up and say, “His name needs to go to the Guinness Book. He is a great rat hunter!” Most people whom we admire as very talented people or high achievers are exactly this—rat hunters. No doubt they have excellence, but must we not bother to ask: is this the field you need to excel in?
If I present a number to you, some random number of, let’s say, six digits, and I say this is the money I am going to give to you and you have the choice to change any one digit in this number—it is a six-digit number, it is the money I am going to give to you, and you have a choice to change any one digit in this number—what would you do?
Questioner: Change the first one to nine.
Acharya Prashant: Change the first one to nine, straight away. So, you know where to excel. Why didn’t you change the last one to nine? Because you don’t want to be a rat hunter, right?
That is what most of us waste our lives doing. If life is a six-digit number, we pick up either the last digit or the second last digit and we spend all our energy and time trying to maximize it. What’s more, we succeed in maximizing it. What do we get? The real thing never gets done, and the top digit never gets addressed, because society has conditioned us to never look at what is the most important; that goes abegging, unaddressed, and we remain fiercely concentrated on the trivial things in life. And we excel there, and we are feated and admired, felicitated.
So, the delusion that we are somebody and we have achieved something gets even more reinforced. “I think I am somebody, even society thinks I am somebody—see what kind of respect they are offering me! See, the magazines are carrying my pics and interviews. See, they are calling me the young leader of the decade.”
Before you excel, ask yourself, “What must I excel in? What is worth it?” Before you speed down a road, ask yourself, “Which road to take?” Speed comes later; the choice of the right road comes first. It is far better to be slow on the right road than to be lightning-quick down the wrong road towards your own destruction.
I repeat, making the perfect choice is far more important than being perfect at the perfect choice. Pick up the right project even if you can’t initially excel at it. Instead, you are taught to choose as per your strengths, because that is what society and the body want. They say, “Pick up something you can excel at.” That is a very, very bad way of decision-making. They say, “Identify your strengths and make your decisions based on your strengths.” No, what you are actually saying is, “I cannot tolerate being bad at what I do, therefore I will pick up something I can be good at.” You are giving prime importance to your ego. You are saying, “If I am doing something, I must be good at it; else I will feel bad, I will feel low, I will feel insulted, and nobody will respect me.” No, no.
First of all, realize what is it really that must be done—must be done—and then pick it up even if you cannot excel at it. Slowly you will learn. It is far better, I said, to be slow on the right road than lightning-quick down the wrong road to your destruction. Being slow is alright; being on the wrong road is not alright. I am not saying that you should be deliberately slow; I am not saying you should be slow for want of effort; I am not giving you a license to be lazy. What I am saying is that the right goal might indeed be so demanding that you might not be able to excel at it, at least initially.
The right goal might not correspond to what your established strengths are. Therefore, you might find yourself struggling initially if you pick the right goal. It doesn’t matter; stay put. Stay put even if you find yourself failing repeatedly. All this comes in the domain of perfection. You are still perfect—how are you perfect? “Irrespective of my repeated failures, I have perfect patience. Irrespective of being beaten twenty times, I am still perfectly in the arena, I have not run away.” This is deeper perfection.
Perfection is not just about winning the championship quickly. Perfection is also about trying again and again, not running away, being the perfect loser. “I lose again and again, but I know that this battle is important; therefore, I will stay put perfectly.” This is perfection.
Perfection doesn’t lie in the output of the work; perfection lies in your intention. Your intention and your direction should be towards liberation. That liberation itself is called perfection. As long as your intention is directed toward liberation, you are working in perfection. Even if in the eyes of the world you are a defeated one, even if the worldly scorecard shows you to be a continuous loser, you are still in perfection.
So, be in pursuit of perfection by choosing the right work, and the right work is that which leads to perfection. And then don’t bother about the results. If you have to lose, keep losing.
