The Perfectionist Trap

Our perspective is imbalanced because we know our own struggles so well from the inside, and yet are exposed to apparently pain-free narratives of achievement on the outside. We cannot forgive ourselves the horrors of our early drafts – largely because we have not seen the early drafts of those we admire.We need a saner picture of how many difficulties lie behind everything we would wish to emulate. We should not look, for example, at the masterpieces of art in a museum. We should go to the studio and there see the anguish, wrecked early versions and watermarks on the paper where the artist broke down and wept. We should focus on how long it took the architect before they received their first proper commission (they were over 50), dig out the early stories of the writer who now wins prizes and examine more closely how many failures the entrepreneur had to endure.

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