Thomas Curran

We know perfectionists work really hard and they push themselves well beyond comfort into a zone of declining and diminishing returns for every little bit of effort that they put in.

Failure is very common among perfectionist people because the goals that they set themselves

are way too high.

And even if they do succeed, perfectionism really just turns those successes into dead ends because the better we do, the better we feel like we're expected to do.

And so we just continually keep ourselves on tiptoes, clinging for more and more.

I suppose it's like running on a treadmill that never slows down.

So it's really tough, the success equation for perfectionists because they really never feel like they've ever made it.

The second reason, I think, why we don't see very strong correlations between perfectionism and performance.

When things start to go wrong, perfectionists do something really, really interesting.

They withhold their effort in order to save face, to kind of preserve their image and their sense of self.

And we've done a lot of experiments looking at this phenomenon.

And one of the

most illuminating those experiments is when a colleague of mine, Andrew Hill, took people into the lab, gave them a cycling task and said, you've got to complete a certain distance in a certain amount of time.

And based on your fitness, you should be able to do X amount of distance.

So he got them going with the task and everybody worked really hard to meet the goal.

and at the end he told them no matter how well they did that you failed now what's really interesting here is that after telling people they failed he asked them to do it again and that's where something remarkable happened because people who didn't have a great deal of perfectionism on that second attempt after the first failure

It didn't really change the amount of effort they put in.

If anything, it went up slightly.

But the people who scored high on perfectionism did the exact opposite.

They withheld their effort on the second attempt because the thinking in their mind is you can't fail at something you didn't try.