Perfectionism is destroying your productivity.

- Thanks to Notion for sponsoring this video and supporting my channel.

When most people think of Steve Jobs, they naturally think of Apple.

But, there's a story about Jobs that's always stuck in my head

and it has nothing to do with Apple.

Well, almost nothing.

In 1985 Jobs was forced out of Apple after a long power struggle with

John Sculley who was the CEO at the time.

In response, Jobs left Apple

and took a handful of the employees with him to start a brand new

company which would develop what was called the NeXT Computer.

This was gonna be a much more powerful,

workstation style computer meant for colleges

and it was housed in this black cube shaped case.

And in Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs,

he recounts how Jobs insisted the black paint

that covered the outside of this case also be applied to the inside at

extra cost even though almost no customer would ever open it up

and see the paint for themselves.

And this story illustrates one of Job's most famous qualities, his perfectionism.

Jobs demanded absolute perfection of all the hardware

and software that he

and his teams developed.

And it's one of the reasons why he was notoriously hard to work for.

It's one of the reasons

that pushed him to be

so cruel to his employees at times.

And yet the legacy left behind by Jobs

and by other famous perfectionists often makes perfectionism seem like something worth striving for.

Some people even wear it as a badge of pride.

That's why, "I'm a perfectionist," is one of the classic cop-out answers to

that age old interview question,

"Tell me your greatest weaknesses."

Along with really brilliant ones.

Like, "I just work too hard, man," or,

"I care too much," or the classic, "I have no weaknesses."

But, as you're gonna find out in the rest of this video,

perfectionism really is a weakness.

Sure, it can have its benefits

and the stories from people like Jobs can make it seem like a strength,

but overall, the drawbacks really do outweigh those benefits.

In 2018 a research review surveyed all of the perfectionism research

that had been done over the past decades.

And they found that

while perfectionism was aligned with being more motivated at work

and putting in more hours,

it was also aligned with stress, with burnout,

with anxiety with overworking

and with depression and to add some anecdotal evidence to

that research review,

I have been a perfectionist for a very long time

and I found some additional drawbacks,

often focus way too intently on a small part of a project

that ultimately doesn't really matter at the end of the day

and it will 'cause me to waste a lot of time.

Earlier this year, I made a video called, How To Think More Strategically.

And if you saw it,

you'll know that we did a lot of chess B-roll in that video.

And I had one shot in particular that I really wanted to get.

I had envisioned having the camera suspended over a chess board,

slowly moving back as different chess positions sort of flashed by.

So, essentially, I had to play out a game of chess on the board

and I could have gotten the shot a lot quicker just by randomly moving

the pieces,

taking one away every once in a while, and then, you know,

taking some stills from that sequence and creating out of that.

But in my mind,

the only way to do

that sequence properly was to play an actual game on the chess board. -

So here Tom is playing against himself. -

So that way,

when saw those chess pieces moving in the shot,

they would be moving in real positions that actually made sense.

And no one has ever commented on that.

I doubt anybody has ever noticed

that they were moving in a realistic way

and that took me way longer than it should have,

but I just couldn't let it go.

And in addition to just wasting time on things

that I really don't need to be fixating on,

I'll sometimes be paralyzed

and unable to start until I get right up against the deadline for a

project.

I'll get ideas, I'll start writing something down and then my brain goes,

"That's not good enough, your audience has better expectations than that of you,

that's not gonna fly."

So, personally, I would like it

if perfectionism had a little bit less influence in my life.

And if you identify

as a perfectionist as well you might want the same things.

So, I wanna talk about some ways to get over this perfectionism

or start moving past it in this video.

And to do that,

I think it's important to tell you what a perfectionist really is,

because it isn't just somebody who has high standards for themselves.

As a psychologist, David Burns describes it,

"A perfectionist is a person whose standards are high beyond reach

or reason and who strains compulsively

and unremittingly towards impossible goals."

And, this part's very important,

"Measures their own worth entirely in terms of productivity and accomplishment."

Having high standards for yourself is a great thing

but perfectionists tend to take it a bit too far.

They set the bar impossibly high

and then they tie their self-worth to it.

Now, classically, perfectionism has been divided into two camps, adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism.

These have also been called excellence seeking perfectionism and failure avoiding perfectionism.

The excellence seeking perfectionist are the people with ultra-high standards for their work.

They're constantly trying to make their work

as good as it can be

and they apply their perfectionism to people working under them

and sometimes even their significant others

and friends as well.

Meanwhile, the failure avoiding perfectionist are the people who are more fixated on not

failing.

They're worried that other people don't think their work is good enough

and by extension,

that they aren't good enough either.

And this can be split up even further.

In 1991, a pair of Canadian psychologists developed their own model with three different

types.

Self-oriented perfectionism, where you have your own ultra-high standards for yourself,

other-oriented perfectionism, where you have unrealistic standards for other people

and then socially-prescribed perfectionism,

where, again, you feel like other people have super high standards for you

and that you can't live up to them.

And when I look at my own perfectionism I can see

that it doesn't neatly fall into any one of these categories.

Yes, I have my own high standards for my own work,

I want to see things be

as good as they can be

but I also feel like the people

that I know both in the real world,

my personal relationships but also my audience online has super high expectations for me

and for my work.

And that creates a lot of pressure

which can lead to

that paralysis and that fixation of the things

that don't really matter at the end of the day.

And while we're talking about these different types of perfectionism, I will note that,

that research review found that the big drawbacks of perfectionism, the depression, the anxiety,

the stress, the burnout,

these were more aligned with the failure avoidance type of perfectionism.

But, they were also aligned with the excellence seeking type

if to a lesser degree,

they still were there.

And crucially, they also found

that neither type of perfectionism was aligned with better overall work performance.

So, even though we may have people like Jobs as the storied counterexample,

the broader research has shown

that being a perfectionist doesn't make you better at your job.

So, the question now is, what can we do about this?

If we are perfectionists,

how can we move past it

and let perfectionism be less of an influence in our life

and on our work?

Well, the first thing is to work on setting more realistic expectations for yourself.

As the author, Martin Anthony, writes in his book, "When Perfect Isn't Good Enough."

"Although standards and beliefs are subjective, people usually take for granted that their interpretations,

their beliefs, their predictions and standards are true.

So becoming less perfectionistic will involve relaxing your standards and changing your perfectionistic beliefs.

It'll involve treating your standards

and beliefs as possibilities

or guesses about the way the world should be,

rather than as hard facts."

And if you, like me,

have that socially prescribed perfectionism I think the best way to start doing this

is to talk to people,

ask them, "What do you really expect of me?"

Because I can not tell you how many times I've had conversations with people

that I work with

or with people in my audience

and find out that what they expect from me is still high

but not to that astronomical level

that I've built up in my head.

Next, if you're gonna perfect something, then perfect how you allocate your efforts.

In other words, get to know the 80/20 rule.

This rule states that 80% of the results often come from just 20% of

the efforts,

the vital few.

And we as perfectionists are often pretty bad identifying those vital few things,

both as individuals but also sometimes as entire organizations.

As I was researching this video,

my editor Tony gave me a great story from the book, "Creativity, Inc."

Which is written by Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, where he writes,

"There is a phenomenon that producers a Pixar call, 'The beautifully shaded penny.'

It refers to the fact

that the artists who work on our films care

so much about every detail

that they will sometimes spend days

or weeks crafting the equivalent of a penny on a nightstand

that you'll never see."

There is a great example of this in Monster Inc,

for Mike and Sulley bring Boo back to their apartment for the first time.

There's this three second shot of a stack of CDs that Boo knocks over.

And even though it's only three seconds long,

and even though you only see a few of the CD covers,

the artists at Pixar took the time to create art for every single one

of those CDs,

there are more than 90 of them.

In telling that story,

Catmull was mainly making a point about the production process of the company,

writing that, "Because of the way production unfolded our people had to work on

scenes without knowing the context for them,

so they just overbuilt them to be safe."

But, there's another insight here as well.

He goes on to write that, "To make things worse,

our standards of excellent are extremely high leading them to conclude

that more is always more."

This is something that perfectionist really deal with.

And the truth is often the opposite.

Often less is more, taking away is more.

So get critical about your work.

Try to identify that crucial 20%,

that vital few and spend a little bit less time fixating on the 80%

that doesn't matter.

Finally, be imperfect on purpose.

One of the most common ways to get over a fear is called exposure

therapy.

Essentially, you expose yourself to the thing you fear over

and over and over again at slightly increasing levels of intensity until eventually,

you're just kind of over it.

And to apply this principle of exposure therapy to this problem,

you need to be imperfect on purpose.

One of my favorite examples of this in action comes from the YouTuber,

Andrew Huang, who makes a ton of music.

And I cannot, for the life of me,

find the video where he said this,

but I saw a video where he said

that he'll often limit himself to four takes

when recording parts for a song.

So if there's a specific guitar lick he's gotta record, he does four takes,

takes the best one and that's it.

And fittingly, Andrew has published hundreds of songs on his Spotify and meanwhile,

I've published three.

So, there's a thing or two that I could learn from Andrew.

Quantity challenges are also a great thing.

Jennifer Dewalt made 180 small websites in 180 days

and learned a ton doing it.

My friend Martin, who helped me write the script for this video

and who is even worse at perfectionism than I am,

by his own admission,

said that he did a daily Instagram challenge where he posted daily photos for

over 200 days as a way to be imperfect on purpose.

And as a side note,

he told me that he recently constructed a portfolio of his best photography work.

There are 24 photos there

and he found out

that 15 of the photos he picked came from

that daily challenge.

So, even though he didn't have a whole lot of time to make perfect

work,

he ended up with work he was proud of.

And there's a reason for this.

Not only do these deadlines give you very little time to fixate

and act on perfectionist tendencies

but they also give you a ton of feedback.

You're making and publishing things

and getting feedback on them

and coming back and reviewing them

and this helps you get better.

Perfectionists don't get a ton of feedback.

That research review I mentioned at the beginning of the video concluded

that perfectionists don't do any better at work than non-perfectionists

but they didn't know why.

And I think this is the reason, perfectionists don't get as many at-bats.

They don't get that feedback that is crucial to growth.

So, be imperfect on purpose.

Not only are you gonna get

that feedback but each time

that you act in an imperfect way you're going to prove to your brain

that imperfection is not the disaster

that I thought it would be.

Imperfect chair turn.

Oh, hey there, other camera angle.

So I'd like to wrap this video up by giving you a quick look

at how we made it,

using Notion.

So at first there is the idea stage.

Martin came up with the idea for this particular video.

So he added this cool content ideas area

that we built which can be separated by our channels,

or, if you switch the view, by topic.

Once we knew that we were gonna make the video we use the template

to create the video project area.

Martin and I both added a ton of research

and outlines to our research area,

pasted tons of links

and then I did a bunch of writing

and turned that all into a script in the script area.

Now, while filming, I pulled up

that script on my iPad

which sits on a music stand next to me

so I can look at the lines

and then to say them into the camera.

Then, once I've done the initial cuts

and know roughly how long the video is gonna be,

I add all my B-roll ideas to a tool called Frame.io,

which gives each one of them a timestamp.

I then export those

and bring them into this pre-made database in my video project.

And, because I have the timestamps I can sort them all chronologically.

But, I can also tag them, film, overhead, screen recording,

whatever it is and switch my view

so I can more efficiently batch them

as I gather them.

Once the video is done,

I create an editing checklist from a template

that reminds me to do all the little things like bordering captions

and adding in cards.

And finally, I had the URL back in the Notion

and I marked the video,

published, so that it shows up in this special archive view we built.

So that is idea generation that is research, scripting, project planning,

to do lists and an archive all in one tool.

And we're able to do this

because Notion isn't just a note taking tool

or to do list app.

It's really a set of building blocks

that allows you to create the exact tools you need for the work

that you want to do.

It can be as simple

as you want or

as complex as you need it to be.

And now is a great time to try Notion out using the link below

because their personal plan is now completely free.

So check out that link below if you want to get started.

And after that, check out my new channel, Thomas Frank Explains,

for some tutorials and even some free templates

that can help you get up

and running more quickly.

Thanks as always for watching this video, hopefully you found it helpful,

hopeful you liked it.

This is the last one for 2020.

So if you did like it,

hit that like button

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and get subscribed.

If you haven't already,

you'll have a subscribe button somewhere on screen along with the other couple videos

you can check out.

And, once again, I'll have that Thomas Frank Explains channel linked here as well,

so you can check

that out if you are interested in upgrading your Notion knowledge

and workspace.

See you in the next one.