Perfectionism
Franz Kafka’s Writer’s Block
Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, writes about three procrastinating writers, Edgar Allen Poe, William James, and Franz Kafka: “In 1908, Kafka landed a position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he was fortunate to be on the coveted “single shift” system, which meant office hours from 8 or…
Read MoreArtist Sol LeWitt’s Productivity Advice: Create More by Focusing on the Work Itself
This short movie contains many F-bombs but offers valid productivity advice: The movie’s text is an F-bombed version of a letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, who struggled with self-doubt: Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping,…Stop it and just DO!……
Read MoreOn Being a “Good Enough” Parent
We live in an age of perfectionist parenting, but one mom was smart enough to bow out: I wish my new-mommy-self had been familiar with the philosophy of the “good enough” mother. Donald Winnicott, a British psychoanalyst coined the term in the 1950′s while studying the interactions of mothers and their infants. He believed mothers…
Read MoreDavid Foster Wallace: Perfectionism as Paralysis
“My life…was often lived as performance art for invisible Simon Cowells”
A moving and wise essay on how one woman’s becoming less perfectionist helped her when she had to face cancer: Around 13 years ago, a confluence of events revealed to me how soul-sucking perfectionism was, and how much the futile striving for it was costing me in stress and anxiety. I began to understand that…
Read MoreWhy Rodin’s “The Thinker” Should be Renamed “The Perfectionist” (Plus, Bonus Balzac!)
Auguste Rodin’s famous “The Thinker” statue (1902) is, all by itself, probably responsible for many cases of perfectionism and procrastination. It’s such a forceful statement that some, looking at it, probably think, “So THAT’S what intellectual work is supposed to look like! A grinding inner struggle! I’d better aim for that, and if my work…
Read MoreLyrical Guy Embodies Perfectionism (Now With More Hemingway)
Someone posted an entertainingly macho/perfectionist take on writer’s block. I’m not going to link to the original, in the interests of protecting the misguided, but it does provide us with a valuable teaching moment, displaying as it does such vivid examples of perfectionism as: Harsh Judgements (“Those who complain about writer’s block are just looking…
Read More“Minecraft” Creator Blocked
Markus Persson, the creator of the megapopular game Minecraft, is blocked on his next project. Sounds like a classic case of situational perfectionism to me. SP often follows a huge success or an early success. (See, also, this.) He sounds like a genuinely nice guy (among other things, a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation)…
Read MoreIs Perfectionism Genetic? (Plus Solutions)
This Wall Street Journal article is old, but still worth checking out. It reports on twin studies showing that some young kids seem to have a biological predisposition to perfectionist behaviors like getting unreasonably upset if their shoelaces are different lengths, or to “[idolizing] the bodies of models and celebrities.” However, the article is quick…
Read MoreNonperfectionist Online Writing
Some good insights in this article on overcoming perfectionism. The author, psychologist Anna Deeds, also discusses how she overcame her perfectionist tendencies when writing online: When I started writing online, I used to read every post 5 or 6 times before I would publish it. You won’t get many posts complete if you read them…
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