Usually because it worked. At some point, getting everything right bought you safety, praise or a sense of control, so your brain kept the habit long after the reason left. It’s also on the rise, and the fastest-growing kind is the feeling that other people expect perfection from you.
Perfectionism has the best PR of any flaw going. It’s the weakness people confess in job interviews while trying not to look pleased with themselves. Nobody says, “My biggest weakness is I’m often late and slightly vague.” Perfectionism gets a pass because it looks like effort. You’re the one who knows it’s eating your evenings.
Why it’s harder than it sounds
The researchers’ definition has two halves: excessively high personal standards and overly critical self-evaluations. The first half pays well. It gets you promoted, hired and trusted. The second half is the one quietly reading your work back to you in a disappointed voice at 11 p.m. They arrive as a pair, so it’s hard to see which one is doing the damage.
It’s also rising. A 2019 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin looked at 41,641 American, Canadian and British college students tested between 1989 and 2016. All three kinds of perfectionism went up. The biggest jump was socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that others demand perfection from you and judge you harshly when you miss. By the authors’ measure it rose 32%. If you feel like everyone is grading you, you’re far from alone.
And the habit usually starts early. The same paper notes that most research on where perfectionism comes from has focused on family environment and, in particular, parenting.
What actually works
Find the job you hired it for
One founder who rose to VP level in financial services traced hers straight back to a tough childhood. “I developed this perfectionist attitude and so I was great in school and I was great at dance and I was just great at everything to be great at something to feel, you know, good.”
Look for your version. Perfectionism almost always started as a strategy. Being flawless kept you safe, or loved, or out of trouble, or noticed. Name the job it was hired for. You’ll find it’s still doing that job for a person who no longer exists.
Give it credit, then give it notice
She doesn’t pretend it was all bad. “That energy has really fueled everything that I’ve done pretty much,” she says. It helped her open a business. She’s just as clear about the cost: “Not that it was the, probably the, the best mental thing to do, but at that time it was a survival mode, you know?”
Both can be true. The habit got you here. It doesn’t automatically get the job of running the next ten years.
Work out whose standard it is
Ask, for any piece of work you can’t let go of: who exactly is going to mark this? If the honest answer is “a client who’d be thrilled with 80% of this,” you’re dealing with your own standard. If it’s “everyone, somehow,” that’s the socially prescribed kind. It sounds like a crowd. It’s usually one voice, and it’s often yours.
Keep the standards, fire the critic
You don’t need lower standards. You need a kinder reviewer. Keep the bar. Drop the 11 p.m. performance review. When the work is good enough for the person it’s for, it ships.
Hear it from someone who’s done it
Janice Diaz went from single motherhood at 19 to VP-level leadership in financial services, and now coaches and consults internationally. On where her perfectionism came from, she admits, “I never really say those things.” She said them anyway. Jump to 1:16 to hear it, or listen to the full episode.
FAQ
Is perfectionism a personality trait?
Researchers treat it as one. The Psychological Bulletin study calls it “an achievement and relational personality trait”. Traits aren’t fixed sentences, though. The same study found average levels shifting across generations, which the authors link to cultural change.
Why does perfectionism make me procrastinate?
If it can’t be perfect, not starting feels safer than starting badly. An unwritten proposal can’t get criticized. The fix is to make the first version deliberately rough and call it a draft out loud, so the critic has nothing to mark yet.
How do I stop being a perfectionist at work?
Decide what “done” looks like before you start, in writing, with the person the work is for. Then stop when you hit it. Your extra three hours of polish are mostly invisible to everyone except you.
Next step
If perfectionism is the reason your expertise still isn’t online, Conceptiv does the visibility and content, so it actually ships.