Advice for My Younger Self (and for your current self, if you, too, struggle with perfectionism)
A cautionary tale about the dangers of doing your best, all day, every day, forever and ever.
Hello, my name is Sarah and I am a recovering perfectionist.
I spent the first thirty-ish years of my life striving to be the best, achieve the most, and make the fewest mistakes. (Zero. Zero mistakes was the goal!)
And now I’ve spent the last fifteen-ish trying to undo all the damage my perfectionism caused—to my mental and physical health, my relationships, and more.
Sound familiar?
If so, I think you’ll enjoy today’s post, which is adapted from my book You Do You: How to Be Who You Are and Use What You’ve Got to Get What You Want.
It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of constantly striving for perfection, and how “Do your best” does not mean (and should not be interpreted by we type-A’ers) as NEVER MAKE A SINGLE MISTAKE OR YOU WILL BE FOREVER BRANDED AN ABJECT FAILURE UNWORTHY OF RESPECT, SUCCESS, OR LOVE.
Trust me, it’s no way to live.
Anyway, keep reading for an excerpt from You Do You, and raise your hand in the comments if you have your own perfectionism recovery tips to share. I’ll take all the help I can get!
Once I became a self-help “guru,” people started asking me, “If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your younger self?”
My answer is always the same: “You don’t have to be perfect.”
(Though if I could give my younger self a second piece of advice, it would be, “In fifteen years, that $29 tongue piercing is going to cost you $700 in dental work, so you might want to reconsider this decision.”)
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a Robert Zemeckis movie, so Young Me will never receive Future Me’s hard-won counsel on the dangers of perfectionism and metal mouth jewelry.1
But I bet that Current YOU could benefit from at least one of these lessons, so I’ve taken the liberty of drafting a letter!
Feel free to print it out and mount it in your locker, cubicle, or bathroom, or inside your underwear drawer—wherever you’re likely to see it on a daily basis. (I really hope you open your underwear drawer on a daily basis.)
And do share it with anyone else in your life who loses sleep over their GPA, their colleagues’ opinions, or being the glue that holds an entire team/household/family/condo board together.
The struggle is real.
Dear Young Me,
Doing your best—performing to your maximum capacity, always—is not sustainable. You’re going to have bad days and slow days and hungover days and if you beat yourself up over all of them and don’t allow yourself time to recuperate, you’re going to be in for a rude awakening in oh, say, 1997.
Lesson #1: Slack off every once in a while, or someday, you will ruin Christmas.
Barely a semester into your freshman year of college, you will get sick. It will start as a common cold, sinus infection–type thing, and despite your burning forehead and throbbing glands, you will soldier on.
You will show up for every class and do all the reading and turn the papers in on time.
You will remain convinced that it’s possible to get straight A’s at one of the country’s premier universities just like you did at your tiny public school in the thirty-ninth-largest state in the union.
You will keep setting your alarm in the morning and studying late into the night.
(You’ll also HANDWRITE all of your English lit essays before typing them up, because computers are still new to you and you’re a glutton for punishment.)
Eventually, for several days following your eighteenth birthday, you will find yourself flat on your back in your single dorm bed with a golf ball–sized lump in your neck and your new college friends stopping by with store-brand OJ and worried looks in their eyes.
You’ll never get a diagnosis, though Future You thinks it’s safe to assume that a combination of stress, toxins, and sleep deprivation was the culprit, and the cure was to go home to the thirty-ninth-largest state in the union for the holidays and lie flat on your back some more until that gross neck thing went away.
Sadly, it turns out that clinging tight to the highest standards and never, ever cutting yourself any slack—until your body stages a feverish, mucus-filled revolt—is nobody’s idea of a joyeux Noël.
So maybe try taking your foot off the gas once in a while? I mean, even Jesus rested on Sundays, and people worship the ground that guy walks on!
Lesson #2: Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.
Three years later, when you are twenty-one—fresh off graduation, your first job, and your first round of start-up layoffs—you will get a new gig working on the ground floor of a gloomy, cigarette smoke–filled town house on the Upper East Side of New York City, as an assistant to a venerable literary agent who rarely has anything nice to say to or about anybody.2
She’s a tough nut to crack, but you’ll make it your personal mission to wow her with your brilliance, your unparalleled work ethic, and your unimpeachable instincts for improving her fifty-year-old business practices.
You are convinced you will be the BEST assistant she has ever had.
Against rather tall odds, everything will be going well until one day when you make an innocent comment that somehow engages her legendary temper and for which she will—almost gleefully—berate you.
To your horror, you will immediately start crying. You are so shocked and terribly confused! Up until this moment, you had been operating under the naïve belief that she couldn’t possibly ever find any fault with you, because…haven’t you been doing everything…PERFECTLY?
Huh.
In reality, you’ll learn that you can study and strive and genuflect all you want, but it’s not going to stop a professor from grading on a curve, a team member from taking credit for your work, or your boss from serving you your ass on a platter someday—whether you deserve it or not.
Honestly, you’d do better to spend a little less time being perfect and a little more time developing a thicker skin.
You’re gonna need it, you cheeky little overachiever, you!
Lesson #3: Damn, it feels good to be a gangster.
Ooh, this one’ll cheer you up.
When you are about twenty-seven years old, a highly respected senior member of your industry will accuse you via phone of being “THE WORST FUCKING EDITOR [he’s] ever worked with,” and you will promptly hang up on him.3
When he calls back and tells your assistant he wants to “offer an olive branch,” you will not only not take his call—you will never speak directly to him again, and it won’t impact your career one little bit.
(In fact, in another ten years, you’ll make a whole new career out of not putting up with other people’s bullshit!)
Maybe you should have abandoned your Little Miss Perfect People-Pleasing ways and let your sassy protecting-your-own-self-interest flag fly more often, is what I’m saying.
Lesson #4: Stop and smell your new business cards.
As the years go by, ambition will continue to be a guiding force in your life. That’s not a terrible thing all by itself—but when you get promoted, instead of pausing to enjoy the new and improved view, you’ll have already set your sights a few rungs higher up the ladder.
You’ll have exciting and commendable successes, but the glow never lasts long before you’re itching to outdo yourself. A smart person will one day tell you this is called “hedonic adaptation,” but you just call it “my late twenties and early thirties.”
It’s like those “personal bests” runners are always posting on Facebook, cogs in a vicious cycle of Never Enough. Achieving a personal best implies that what one did last time—which was at that point one’s “best”—was not good enough, so one kept pushing to improve it.
Ergo, one is never satisfied.
Of course, there’s much to be said in favor of self-improvement, but riddle me this:
If your best is never good enough, then what good is it?
(You’re no ultramarathoner, but this lesson will come in handy when you write a few very popular self-help books of which you are quite proud, and yet Oprah seems to have permanently misplaced your number.)
Lesson #5: Dial back on the “git ’er done.” It’s good for you and it keeps everyone else on their toes.
This is something you’ll figure out on your own pretty early on, but it’s worth reiterating for anyone else who may be reading this letter, of whom Future You hopes there are several hundred thousand, because wouldn’t that be neat?
Know that while you’re busy perfecting your modus operandi, other people will notice.
And they will start taking advantage of you.
These folks will see that you are an unstoppable machine of excellence, and they will, consciously or unconsciously, begin depending on you to prop them up. It happens to you in school when other kids crane their necks to copy off your paper, and it’ll happen to you at jobs and within relationships.
I encourage you to stay vigilant and try not to add unnecessary burdens to your actual workload or your emotional labor-load. After all, doing your best is exhausting enough without picking up everyone else’s slack along the way.
Instead, how about we let them do their goddamn best for a change? Imagine that!
Okey dokey, that’s it for now, kiddo. I hope you’ll take these lessons to heart. Although if you do, I guess that means a lot of the events I’ve described above will never come to pass and you might not wind up writing this book, which means Future You can’t actually teach you the lessons, which means…I suppose it’s a good thing we don’t live in a Robert Zemeckis movie.
So yeah, you’re a little bit screwed in your teens and twenties. Sorry about that.
But hey, what doesn’t kill us makes us potty-mouthed gurus who can help a lot more people on the back end, which isn’t such a bad outcome.
Onward, to lessons lived and learned!
Love,
Future You
For anyone under twenty-five years old, that’s a Back to the Future reference. Great movie. You should watch it.
RIP, Lois. You were a real one.
He did not like the draft cover art you sent for his client’s book. The horror!
This is such excellent life advice. When I train new people at work one of the things I tell them is, “there is nothing you can fuck up so badly that it cannot be fixed.” I can see the weight fall off their shoulders. Everyone has bad days or bad weeks, and you have to be kind to yourself when you do.
Thank you for this awesome article!💕
Really needed this! Being the dependable one sucks and is such a struggle. I LIKE being dependable, good at what I do, but as you've said and I've learned from a lot of recent experience, that has to come with some powerful boundary setting or your setting yourself up for failure in work, life, health, everything.