Embrace The Beauty Of Imperfection

Our biggest enemy is ourselves, and that is especially true for the perfectionist. But sometimes, being better also means being a little less perfect and more “ish”

We dedicate a lot of time to the pursuit of perfection, but a new book says we should instead be embracing the concept of “ish”. So often, the simple question of asking a friend or family member how they are doing is met with the same response: busy.

Living on hyper-drive in an effort to keep everything together has become the new normal, but is it really worth it? Are we just left feeling burnt out? As a “reformed perfectionist” herself, Australian author Lynne Cazaly has been there. Her career experience as a board director and mentoring high-performing executives, as well as going through some personal health scares, all contributed to a stark realisation: Life is simply far too short for perfection.

For the sixth book she has written, ish: The Problem with Our Pursuit for Perfection and the Life-changing Practice of Good Enough, Lynne draws on the work of researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, who define perfectionism broadly as a combination of excessively high standards and overly critical self-evaluations. In their study of more than 40,000 people from the late 1980s to 2016, Thomas and Andrew looked at the changes across three different dimensions of perfectionism.

The first is “self-oriented perfectionism”, where individuals have unrealistic expectations of themselves, are highly self-critical and attach irrational importance to being perfect. The second is “other-oriented perfectionism”, where you evaluate others critically and hold them to unrealistic standards. The third dimension, “socially prescribed perfectionism”, is where you believe that your social context is excessively demanding, that you are judged harshly, and that you must display perfection for approval.

Spending Too Much Time On One Thing