What Is Perfectionism?

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Black-and-white thinking makes people neatly divide their pursuits into extreme categories.

Some struggle to see the overlap between their more and less successful pursuits, thus avoiding the latter.

While it's easy to use negativity as an excuse to avoid something scary, that doesn't make it true.

Many struggle with knowing where to start. They may know what they want, or at least have some general sense of it, but can’t seem to motivate themselves to pursue it. While it’s true that difficulty with beginning tasks is associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and major depressive disorder, being symptoms of both, and obsessive compulsive disorder, which entails analysis paralysis, it’s also associated with the way we perceive the world and how we tend to learn about it.

Some people meaningfully struggle with conceptual overlap. This means that fuzzy categories scare them. To them, a thing is either a thing or it isn’t. Very binary; very black-and-white. The world only makes sense when everything in it is neatly organized and categorized. So, if you're this type of person, it’s easy to divide up your successes and failures. There are those things in which you naturally excel and those that feel impossible to complete. Missing the overlap between the categories, it then becomes just as easy to avoid engaging with the latter group. Why bother if you’re just going to fail? In this rigid........

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