Repeatist Perfectionism Trumps Completist Perfectionism
On how we define excellence
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people…I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it. –Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Among a certain achievement-oriented class, labeling oneself a perfectionist functions as a form of humble bragging. When asked how our week is going, we complain how stressed we are in part, and perhaps unconsciously, to signal how exacting we are in our work. When asked in job interviews to name a flaw, we sigh and concede that, sometimes, we care too much.
Every value offers tradeoffs, and all else equal it’s probably better to encourage high standards. But often we fail to consider which high standard we’re actually aiming for. Specifically, I think there are actually two modes of perfectionism which need to be disambiguated:
Completist Perfectionism — Completist perfectionism is what it sounds like: high standards for your finished product. This is the form of perfectionism that causes us read and reread our email drafts before sending them, or rehearse our wedding speech a million times; the form that, if pressed, I think most people would claim to be suffering from (or “suffering” from, as it were).
Repeatist Perfectionism — Repeatist perfectionism is high standards for your work process or your skill at whatever you are doing. (I think these goals are functionally interchangeable.) This is the form of perfectionism that causes us to stay after practice shooting free throws, or produce a new drawing from scratch every day for a month. I think this is the form of perfectionism most people should be aiming for.
Repeatist perfectionism generally trumps completist perfectionism because it has compounding returns, whereas completist perfectionism mostly just pays off once. Whether you’re a sculptor, a seamstress, or a software engineer every project you do provides two benefits: you make a thing and you get better at making such things. But the amount you learn throughout the project is not linear. At the beginning and middle of the project, there tends to be more to figure out, and more novel problems to solve; at the end (when, not coincidentally, completist perfectionism is most likely to rear its head) progress often takes the form of polishing and error-spotting.1
In other words, you can accelerate your learning simply by increasing the ratio of time spent beginning projects to time spent finishing them. Or, as computer scientist James Somers puts it:
If there’s something you want to do a lot of and get good at—like write, or fix bugs—you should try to do it faster.
That doesn’t mean be sloppy. But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy. That’s because the task will come to cost less in your mind; it’ll have a lower activation energy. So you’ll do it more. And as you do it more (as long as you’re doing it deliberately), you’ll get better. Eventually you’ll be both fast and good.2
To be sure, there are times when completist perfectionism is necessary—say, a capstone school project, a very important presentation, or an opportunity with exceptional rewards for success. The mistake is thinking that every assignment warrants completist perfectionism. In fact, in the long-run, if you really want to be able to knock your big assignment out of the park, your best strategy is increasing your skill (i.e., through repeatist perfectionism) so that on the rare occasions when you want to cash out (i.e., through completist perfectionism), you have a bigger bank of “moves” and mental resources to draw on.3
So often, we outwardly lament our perfectionism while secretly clinging to the belief that, but for our high standards, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Perhaps in some cases that’s true.
Or, perhaps, it’s a narrative we clutch at because we’re too busy navel-gazing to look to the horizon. The truth is, moving on to the next one isn’t a lowering of standards at all; it is a pursuit of excellence in its own right—in the purest and most consequential form.
As is so often the case, this dichotomy is reductive of what is in reality a continuum or multidimensional space. For example, in the course of turning out a big project, it’s common to iterate or adapt work from one medium to another; is this repeatist perfectionism because the creator is starting over, or completist perfectionism because Version One was just the first step in a long process that led to the end result? Obviously it depends how you look at it.
I think this point about activation energy is true and useful, but I see it as more of a side effect than primary benefit of repeatist perfectionism. (Ironically, Somers also notes “I have been working on this little blog post, on and off, no joke, for six years.” I don’t think this refutes his argument for speed so much as highlighting the important caveat that some projects really do warrant completist perfectionism.)
To the extent that success is probabilistic, quantity has the added benefit of giving you more bites at the apple—a point I’ll be elaborating on in a future post.