LibraryPatternsLet Go of PerfectionismI measure everything I do against the very best in th…
Problem
Toward Craftsmanship

I measure everything I do against the very best in the world — the top expert, the flawless example — so my own work always looks inadequate by comparison. Holding myself to an impossible benchmark guarantees I never feel I am good enough.

Part of the pattern: Let Go of Perfectionism
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You might also say it as
  • “I measure my work against the best in the world”
  • “I compare myself to the top experts”
  • “an impossible benchmark makes me always fall short”
The path forward
  1. 1Notice the benchmark you're using
  2. 2Measure against realistic peers
  3. 3Let good work be good enough
One thing to try this week
Compare one piece of work this week to where you were a year ago, not to the world best. Progress is a fairer and more useful yardstick than perfection.
Related problems
A single typo or tiny error can consume me — I will fixate on it long after it is fixed, certain everyone noticed and judged. Trivial mistakes that others would shrug off feel, to me, like glaring proof of carelessness.Accepting good-enough work from myself or my team feels like a concession — a failure to care enough. The identification of good enough with not caring has made adequate work feel like a moral failure.Every sentence I write is edited before the next one appears. I cannot produce a rough draft because editing is embedded in the first pass. The writing is slow and the output is polished from the start but minimal.Every time I get close to my standard, the standard moves higher, so I never actually arrive. What looked like the goal becomes the new baseline the moment I reach it, and I am running on a track that extends itself with every step.Everything has to pass through me before it goes out. I have become the bottleneck in my own organisation because I cannot trust work I have not personally reviewed.I apply the same exacting standard to a quick internal email as I do to a public report. The standard does not scale with context and I am exhausting myself and my team with inappropriately high bars.

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