What Is Perfectionism?

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Perfectionism is a preoccupation with control, which makes us falsely believe that we create our own luck.

Accepting the role of luck can help steer us away from fixating on rewards to focus on our stable traits.

Marcus Aurelius argued that beauty doesn't need praise to be beautiful, as that quality is self-evident.

Perfectionism, at bottom, is an outsized sense of self-importance, or control. Taking on all of the responsibility of both success and failure eliminates the possibility of acknowledging the most feared aspect of life to many of us: chance. Therefore, emotionally, perfectionism is akin to gambling addiction. Intellectually, many gamblers can easily tell you they know how significant luck is to betting. Yet, despite that, their reactions betray another, more fundamental, reality.

People with gambling addiction tend to feel like losers and winners, as though they’re the sole or main source of complex outcomes. Some feel as though they’re special because they’re lucky (at least at times, such as when they say they’re ‘due for a win”), so they account for luck but do so in a personal manner—in this way, they’re still the reason they won. Others believe winning and losing stem from intelligence, using fallacious thinking to convince themselves they’re great players, even if it’s because they merely have the courage to persist in the face of defeat (I’m not referring to poker since it requires more skill than your average casino game). While this mindset can be helpful in areas that demand a strong work ethic, it’s detrimental in those also involving a significant amount of luck, such as the entertainment industry.

Perfectionists, however, are rarely content with life’s usual rewards, setting their sights instead on fame and/or universal acclaim, even if only within some specific industry. While pursuing acclaim isn’t inherently harmful, rigidity and myopia are. Like the obsessive gambler, the perfectionist spends their time trying to game the system, to control luck. They somehow lump the concept of luck in with the idea of working hard—the harder you work, the more luck you’ll have. While it’s true that working hard may increase your opportunities, it’s a logical stretch to infer that working hard is synonymous with owning luck. Unlike the cliche, fortune doesn’t always favor the bold; sometimes, it even favors the timid. Luck, for the most part, exists outside of our influence; we can’t even adequately define ‘chance’—we just know it’s there.

Through self-deception, the gambler uses an external reward to prove their superiority to themself. On that day, in that moment, compared to others, they were better. Dividing the world up between winners and losers, the myopic perfectionist not only fails to account for all of the elements of success, including trends and biased preferences (which often have little to do with the perfectionist), they also often fail to note what’s already there; the ugliness of competition blinds you to beauty. In my writing, I repeatedly refer to our minds and how much they influence our conceptions of things. I do so because mental illness, largely stemming from them, with its accompanying inflexibility, precludes us from noticing, or causes us to devalue whatever we do.

In the philosophical classic, Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Everything in any way beautiful has its beauty of itself, inherent and self-sufficient: praise is no part of it. At any rate, praise does not make anything better or worse. This applies even to the popular conception of beauty, as in material things or works of art. So does the truly beautiful need anything beyond itself? No more than law, no more than truth, no more than kindness or integrity. Which of these things derives its beauty from praise, or withers under criticism? Does an emerald lose its quality if it is not praised? And what of gold, ivory, purple, a lyre, a dagger, a flower, a bush?” This is antithetical to the gambler’s mindset, constantly searching for the dopamine hits of validation, which thrive, in large part, on both luck and self-deception. The gambler never notices what’s beautiful about them, never allows themself to see beyond their comparisons to everyone else in the room.

Seeing beauty, even in oneself, begins with curiosity. Is there more to the gambler than winning? Are they charismatic, clever, kind, wise, or endearing? Do they need to win to offset some distorted self-concept, or can they learn to see through it, finding a more stable sense of self? Do they devalue parts of themself that others appreciate? Or do they devalue themself because they aren’t perfect? In reality, the gambler obviously only feels good when they’re winning. Yet, the stoic, according to Aurelius, doesn’t need social trappings, the so-called ‘preferred indifferents.’ Fortunately, there is a middle ground for the rest of us, who aren’t as self-assured. We can accept that we need some wins without resorting to something like the constant pursuit of validation through gambling. Indefinite winning, for lack of a better term, can be challenging because of its scope, which includes luck, timing, and (depending on the industry) even popularity. But we can still be winners to some, who take the time to learn about us and our gifts. They see us at our cores, beyond the folly and ugliness of our obsessions.

For instance, most of the world may not love my writing because it doesn’t suit the tastes of some, writing about perfectionism may not be in vogue, writing about it in this particular epoch was a stroke of bad luck, and other factors, especially those related to algorithms. But some consistently read it, which means that it may stand alone as meaningful or even beautiful because someone somewhere out there thinks it is. It being beautiful is now a fact of life, even if all that anyone else can see is ugliness. If my goal was to write something beautiful, then I have succeeded. But it’s my responsibility to find a way to see that through the ugliness of my own mind, to see what's obvious to someone else.

What Is Perfectionism?

Take our Perfectionism Test

Find a therapist near me

Podcast on Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which focuses on his concept of beauty.

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