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…

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On 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…

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Lyrical 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…

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“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)…

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Is 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…

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Nonperfectionist 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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