I’m a perfectionist. Perhaps you are too… Most of us think of perfectionism as a personal failing—a toxic combination of overly high personal standards and unrelenting self-judgement. But perfectionism is deeply ingrained in our culture. In virtually every aspect of our lives we are measuring ourselves against a gold standard: the perfect test score in education, the perfect season in sports, the unbroken string of rising quarterly profit in business, and the perfect body at the gym and in the mirror. Perfection enthralls us.

A 2017 study of college students in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom found that perfectionism is on the rise in all three countries. The college students surveyed believe that others are more demanding of them, they are more demanding of others, and they are more demanding of themselves.

What’s fueling the rise in perfectionism among young people? Northwestern University counseling program cites a number of factors, including: 

• Exposure to the seemingly perfect self-representations of others on social media

• An increasing number of individual activities focused on personal achievement, and less time spent doing group activities

• Our cultural focus on educational and professional achievement

• Our cultural focus on monetary wealth and social standing

• Parental pressure and achievement anxiety

Healthy perfectionists are able to set high goals and standards in order to challenge themselves. They can accept and learn from their failures and stay actively engaged. Unhealthy perfectionists set extremely high and unrealistic goals for themselves, become obsessed with achieving their goals or wind up avoiding the activity altogether. Those with unhealthy perfectionism can suffer bouts of anxiety, depression, hostility, anorexia and more. Sadly, some also experience suicidal thoughts… It’s time to reframe the idea of perfection and develop a new relationship with perfectionism.

Perfectionism and the Imagination

The origins of perfectionism lie in the imagination, in the ease with which we can conjure up a picture of an ideal state of affairs, compared with the monstrous difficulty of bringing such a state into being by ourselves. The sickness of perfectionism gestates in the fertile gap between our noble visions and our mediocre reality.

— School of Life, How to Think More Effectively

Imagination is one of our greatest gifts, and one of our biggest liabilities. The images we conjure in our minds—of ourselves, others, and what we hope to create—are always perfect and almost always impossible to realize in the material world. But our visions of perfection aren’t just in our heads: our worship of perfection is also manifested in our media saturated environment—and in the technology we use to create that environment. Even the snapshots you take with your smartphone present you with idealized representations of the people, objects, and scenes you’ve captured.

For example, when you take a photo on your iPhone the image you see isn’t the actual image you captured when you pressed the shutter button, it’s a composite of multiple images of the same scene the camera captured and the software analyzed to improve the details in the shadows and light, adjust the color, reduce the noise in the image, and make other enhancements. Our smartphones take amazing photos—and they are just one example of how the gap between our mediated environment and the “real” world is widening. In other words, even a simple snapshot is now an idealized representation of reality.

Like Narcissus endlessly staring into the pond, we’re torturing ourselves with both internal and external images of unattainable perfection. But we are also suffering because we are unable to see perfection for what it is: a construct. Think about the iPhone photo and how it’s generated from multiple images, each analyzed and tuned to add a different dimension to the final image. No single image is perfect, not even the final composite image, but together the various images express a vision (and likely not the only vision) of the “perfect” outcome. We need to shift our focus from the perfect result to the process that brings us closer to achieving the result.

At the beginning of this article, I wrote about the ways our culture is enthralled with perfection and the debilitating impact that’s having on young people. It seems appropriate to use the words of Olympic champion swimmer Katie Ledecky as an example of what a more process-focused idea of perfection looks like: "As I’ve said many times, I think I love the training almost as much if not more than the racing…”

Her words are gold.

Art as an Artifact of the Gradual Movement Toward the Ideal

The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958) was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1956. A member of the Generation of 1898, the group of young artists dedicated to revitalizing Spanish culture in the wake of the country’s defeat in the Spanish–American war of 1898, Jiménez began his literary career writing poems that used daring metaphors and complex meters to create intricate, introspective, aesthetically beautiful poetry. Over the course of his career, he proceeded to strip away the adornments he employed in his earlier work with the goal of creating what he called “naked poetry”—spare, precise poems of mystical discovery and transcendence. An avowed perfectionist, he left us with an idea of perfection that is wholly focused on the gradual movement toward perfection, not the final achievement of perfection.

Editor and translator Christopher Maurer has compiled Jiménez’s writing on perfection, poetry, rhythm, silence, nature, instinct, revision, and related topics into a meditation on Jiménez’s life and work called The Complete Perfectionist: A Poetics of Work. Here’s Maurer on Jiménez’s reconceptualization of perfectionism:

For him, something perfect is something that is becoming complete and is nothing but becoming: a thing moving slowly and successively into its own, helped along, in the case of art, by instinct and intelligent reflection. Perfection means gradual movement toward an ideal intuited in creative reverie or, as Juan Ramón puts it, in “the well-nourished subconscious.”

Maurer again:

He gives us a new vision of perfection, not as an abstract, distant goal, and not as the absence of defects, but as an "endless fervor" that enlivens the hourly and daily course of our work.

A pathway, not a goal. A process that moves us toward perfection through our love of our chosen work, not a culmination. Jiménez believed perfection is “dynamic and successive … a thing “in movement toward its plentitude.” (Maurer) No wonder Jiménez loved the English phrase “work in progress…”

He also embraced inconsistency (imperfection), calling it “the gift of inspiration.” He wrote: “Yes, inconsistent. Like all natural and supernatural forces: water, air, fire, earth, the flesh, light, love, the rose, grace, joy, pain.” To Jiménez, “complete” is “perfect and imperfect in equilibrium.”

Jiménez’s vision of perfection is well suited to our time, an era of rapid movement, and dynamic, successive change. Maurer one last time:

To him, what is no longer “in progress” can move no one, not even its creator. Something truly perfect gives us the feeling of imminence, of being about to happen. Perfection is always being realized, and even when it is abandoned, the perfect poem will continue, always, to “quiver with emotion and intelligence.” Perfection is approximation. It is “penultimate perfection,” the “always never.” In poetry and in any creative work, there is always another step, leading to boredom and sterility, and it is better not to take it.

Perfection reimagined as the persistent process of becoming is Jiménez’s gift to us. Our never quite finished, never quite perfect works are the artifacts of our commitment to the process—the visible manifestations of days, weeks, and months spent in successive movement toward a sustaining vision of perfection.

Jiménez beautifully illustrates his vision of perfection and imperfection in equilibrium in one of his most famous poems:

Poem

    Touch it no more.
The rose is like that.

Additional Reading

Juan Ramón Jiménez in English

• Lorca & Jiménez: Selected Poems, translated by Robert Bly

• The Poet and the Sea, translated by Mary Berg and Dennis Maloney

• Invisible Reality, translated by Antonio T. de Nicolas

• Platero and I, translated by Eloise Roach

Three Poems

Translations by Robert Bly, from Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems.

“I Am Not I”

I am not I.
                       I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And at other times I forget.
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
The one who will remain standing when I die.

“I Took Off Petal After Petal”

I took off petal after petal, as if you were a rose,
in order to see your soul,
and I didn’t see it.
However, everything around—
horizons of fields and oceans—
everything, even what was infinite,
was filled with a perfume,
immense and living.

Oceans

   I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
                                     And nothing
happens! Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves. . . .
—Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

Twenty Aphorisms

Jiménez was a prolific writer of poems and aphorisms. Here are twenty aphorisims on perfection, work, and time translated by Christopher Mauer:

What a struggle within me between the complete and the perfect!

I would give the better half of my work not to have written the other.

Much and perfect. In the and lies the secret, the little problem.

In any work that is “complete,” the perfect and the imperfect must exist in equilibrium, each with its perpetual, unavoidable, demanding, beautiful reality.

I am so abstracted in the eternal that spiders have woven cobwebs between my feet.

I like not the event but its representation. For in the event I am only a participant or a spectator, and in the representation of it I am a creator, a poet.

All the work of the universe is no more than time and rhythm, rhythm and time. Balance, and a means to make that balance.

Let man revolve around his work like a star, without haste but without rest.

Go slowly in art: let each hour give us what it should. Don’t try to race ahead of the hours.

When you feel hurried, walk more slowly.

Slowly, you will do everything quickly.

To work isn’t to do a lot in a hurry or, above all, many times; it is to make unique, very well made things.

Work, like life, is resolved successively.

So that my whole self can be content with my work, I need my conscious half to refine, measure, define, and fix what my subconscious has created.

When we evoke the rose as an example of simplicity, we don’t often think of the centuries nature took to create it.

In the life of the intellect, one should have, from time to time, a day of synthesis, analyzing and polishing the labor of days past: something like the beginning of a new life.

To conquer each day with the ideas of each day.

If we do not work drunkenly on our work, we grow bored by time and space: the personified, named external witness of our ennui. When we do grow drunk on our work, time and space are our inner allies, our invisible and anonymous true friends.

To embrace all of your work, work much on a little each day.

Let us propose a distant goal, far away in an infinite future, and walk toward it each day, slowly, without stopping, enjoying in all their fullness what lies beside the road and what we leave behind.