Anne Morris

What I think people get wrong about perfectionism is it is more about escape from failure than pursuit of the perfect.

Because it presents as pursuit of the perfect, but the cognitive distortion is that mistakes and failure are going to reveal that I don't belong here, right?

It's that mistakes are so costly.

That I'm going to avoid them, use all of my energy to avoid them, cover them up, keep other people from them, pretend that gravity doesn't apply to me.

By any means necessary.

There are good fonts and bad fonts, and that is a black and white world that I will live in and die on.

Okay.

No, I know.

I know.

And getting feedback, getting early feedback.

This is a phenomenon back to our women in academia.

This is a phenomenon that you have observed from the beginning of your career that this perfectionist instinct would lead...

To take so much longer in writing the paper.

Meanwhile, the men were putting stuff out there, getting feedback, co-producing better results and really learning.

And the women were denying themselves that opportunity.

And the flawed story here is I cannot ask for help.

Asking for help is a sign of weakness.

Again, it will reveal that I don't belong here.

In fact, the pattern is even stronger that the people we see continuously rise in organizations, they truly excel at asking for help.

And this comes at a huge cost to organizations because people, in addition to people not being so far away from the frontier of what they can contribute, problems just don't get escalated at the right time.