Thomas Curran: Perfectionism: The Power Of Good Enough In A World That Always Wants More

Hi everyone and welcome to our podcast In Good company. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, and your host today. Today, we are doing a bonus episode with a world-leading expert on perfectionism. Why do we work so hard? Does it lead to better results?

Thank you very much, that's a lovely introduction, great to chat.

Great, now. What is perfectionism?

Okay, so I guess the starting point for understanding perfectionism is really to get into the weeds of it a little bit and understand where it begins. And perfectionism begins with a place of lack, of a place of deficit, of a feeling that we are not quite enough, not perfect enough. And from that starting point, what we're trying to do as perfectionistic people is conceal, disguise, hide to repair in some way what we know deep down, to be an imperfect self. So perfectionism is really about trying to overcome what we feel is deficit and lack through excessive standards, through trying to project into the world a perfect image of ourselves. We want other people to see perfect performances, perfect appearances because of that starting point of lack.

So in the book, which is by the way a fantastic book, The Perfection Trap, you all have to read it. You split perfectionism into three. It is the self-oriented perfectionism, the kind of thing you cause yourself. It's how you impose your perfectionism on other people, and how in a way you make a lot of people miserable. And then the type of perfectionism that the society is imposing through you now, also through social media, but if you start with kind of the self-oriented perfectionism, what is that?

Self-oriented perfectionism is a burning need to be perfect and nothing but perfect. And it comes with self-critical tendencies when we haven't met those high and excessive standards. So when we feel like we fell short, we feel very self-critical. We go in on ourselves, How could you be so stupid? What we think in sort of internal dialogue.

Are you born with it?

To a certain degree, yes. About 30 to 40 of self-oriented perfectionism is inherited, so if you have perfectionistic parents, it's highly likely you'll probably carry some of those tendencies through yourself. But that also leaves a lot for the environment to explain, so it's a mixture of both.

And any geographical differences, for instance? I just saw that speed train in Japan, the last, what is it? 50 years. The average delay has been less than one second. Whilst in the I'm not going to say what happens to trains in the UK, but they are.-.

They're always on time.

You know, in Switzerland everybody's on time, everything works, you go to Spain everybody's 15 minutes late, if not more. Is it tied to geographies?

Of course, there will be definite cultural differences in perfectionism. We don't again. This is a great thing about perfectionism in some ways as an academic. Because the data is very limited, so there's a lot of opportunity to explore these research questions. What we do know from the data that we've collated is that, if you look at self-oriented perfectionism, for instance, that I self-set, need and desire to be perfect. Well, that's really high in the U.S. for example, but not so high in European countries. So the kind of very individualistic focus of the U.S. economy, you know, the kind of American dream, so to speak, certainly is impacting on people's psychologies in terms of self-oriented, but less so in other areas.

Thomas Can a perfectionist be married to a non-perfectionist?

Oh.

Because you tried, right?

Yeah, well, I would say it would be tricky, not impossible, but I think there would be a lot of clashes and a lot of tensions, perhaps. But that's not to say it couldn't be worked through. That's not to say that. You know, love is love at the end of the day. But yeah, I would say it would be a challenge, for sure.

Moving on to the second strand of the perfectionist model, what you call the other-oriented perfectionism, so you are perfect and you expect everybody else to be perfect.

Yes.

So, tell me about that.

Well, the other-oriented perfectionism is really perfectionism. Turned outwards, I suppose it's what Freud would call projection, right? So you've got this idea of I'm pouring myself over hot coals to be perfect. And I'm very self-critical when I haven't met that high standard. So it's only fair that everyone around me is going to have to carry those same expectations, the same pressures with them, right? Like, this is just a moral question in the mind of the other-oriented perfectionist, which is fine.

Well, isn't this kind of the description of the boss from hell?

Yeah, I would say, so, yeah, there's a lot of high-profile people who, I would say, have had other-oriented, perfectionistic tendencies. Steve Jobs, for instance, pioneering entrepreneur, turned Apple's fortunes around. Clearly a hugely successful guy, but also a perfectionistic person. And testimony from ex-colleagues have described him as having exceptionally high standards. And not being able to tolerate when things haven't gone quite to plan.

Well, I've seen some stats which says that 70 of people who leave their jobs, they do it because of the immediate boss. Do you think there's a lot of this micromanagement involved here?

I think so. I mean, when people feel like they're under surveillance all the time, when if they make a mistake, there's going to be ramifications, sometimes quite severe. Then that stops us from allowing ourselves to be wrong.

What does it do to you?

Well, it creates in us a sense that, okay, well, we've got to do everything at 100, we have to do everything perfectly. Essentially, every single job, every single email, every single project, every single presentation has to be absolutely nailed to the satisfaction of our bosses. And if we slip up, there's going to be problems. And of course, we are human beings.

Moving on to the third part of the model here, the socially prescribed perfectionism. What is that?

Socially prescribed perfectionism is perfectionism that comes from the outside, so yes, perfectionist people want to be perfect for their own end. And yes, sometimes they can project those expectations onto others. But also there's a sense in the perfectionist people that other people have the same expectations that I have on myself for me.

So.

It can come from the immediate people around us, or it can just come from the environment. More generally. It's just a lens through which we view the world, which tells us that everybody's watching. They expect flawless performances, and if I don't meet up to those high and excessive expectations, then they're waiting to pounce.

You talk about a perfectionist epidemic.

Exactly, and this is the exact form of perfectionism that we're seeing rise really, really sharply. It's very widespread, it's on an exponential curve, which means it's rising very fast. And we'll continue to rise even faster into the future. If we don't do something about it.

Seem to have started around 2005.

I don't know. That period was very simple.

We kind of know what happened then.

Yeah, there wasn't much going on in 2005, 2006, 2007. Was there then what happened? Clearly there was big events around the mid-2000s. We all know what happened. Well, tell us what happened.

Don't you think that's the really main thing here?

Yeah, I think so, but I think there's no doubt about it that that day is significant in terms of social media platforms. Being transported into our lives. 24-7, no escape from limitless images of perfect lives and lifestyles that are beamed at us almost 24-7..

So what does social media do to us?

Well, social media creates a scrambled reality, a hyper-reality, so to speak, where everybody is curating perfect lives. And lives into which we feel like we have to conform, we have to match, right? What we see around us is this kind of limitless aura of perfection, and so we not only feel that that's desirable, i...e. That's how we should be living, too, should be living, but also that it's eminently obtainable. Because everybody else seems to have this luxurious life and lifestyle, attractive, fit, healthy, productive and all the rest of it. And that if we don't match those excessive expectations, those warped expectations that there must be something wrong with us, that somehow we must be flawed, deficient, imperfect.

Well, it seems to be. I mean, there are numbers and research showing the relationship between how much time you spend on social media, your level of happiness. And so you would have thought that there was an element of that in there.

Sure, sure, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of research to show that social media can undermine happiness, particularly overuse of social media. The more time you're on there, the less happy you are. That's what the data seems to be suggesting.

I've seen research lately which seem to indicate that. Well, I mean, the results vary a bit. But everywhere, from one in three to one in five of young people have psychological problems. How is that linked to perfectionism?

Yeah, I mean, we have to be careful to extrapolate too much from the data. Of course, all I've done is done a big, very large piece of cohort analysis, which is showing that perfectionism is rising over time. And what I'm trying to do in the book is say that. Perhaps there's something underneath that trend which tells us about these more observable outcomes that we're seeing in society. I...e. The links between perfectionism and depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and all the rest of it are perhaps one of the reasons why we're seeing those things increase, rise of perfection is rising in lockstep with those things.

Now, perfectionists rarely seek help or go to therapy. Why is that?

Because there's such an intent need to disguise hiding. The base motive for perfectionist people is to avoid showing any chink in the armoury, to avoid failure, setback, shortcomings. And they will avoid them to such an intense degree that they are happy to sabotage their chances of success. The primary motive is not to be seen to slip up, not to be seen to be vulnerable. And so, you know, when you move through the world with that focus and that priority, then, of course, when things go wrong, when you hit setbacks, which you will. When we encounter grief, heartbreak, things that are outside of our control, when a global pandemic comes along and makes things really tough. The perfectionist tries to push through those things, tries to put their foot harder on the accelerator, to try to use their perfectionism to overcome what's happening to them.

The slightly counterintuitive thing here is that, or you say so in the book at least, that. Perfectionists are actually not doing better at school, and they are not doing better in the workplace, so they are not more successful generally.

How come? Well, there's a very interesting psychology among perfectionists, and this is something that we didn't expect to see when we did our studies. And yet it came back time and time again, and I've called it the perfectionistic paradox.

What I think is really funny here is that a lot of people try to be perfect, but we just don't like perfect people. I mean, we don't, right. We like people who got failures. We actually trust people more when they admit mistakes than if they don't, and I just think that's really, really odd.

Well, okay, I'll put that question to you. You've obviously have an esteemed career. Have you worked in organizations where that hasn't been the case? That's to say that you felt under pressure to perform to a certain level and that mistakes have been punished. And has that created a lot of anxiety in you?

Absolutely, absolutely. I have worked places where it wasn't allowed and I was pretty miserable.

But why were you miserable? Is it because you didn't like that culture and you wanted to get out of it? Or is it because of the fear that those cultures instilled about making mistakes? Or was it because it didn't create harmonious relationships at all?

I think all the above.

No, yeah.

Moving into this area, this perfectionism in the organisation.

Well, Nicola, I think that's a question for you, as much as it is for me because I'm an academic. I mean, I can tell you about cultures and organisations and certain practices that firms have employed that have been successful in addressing these issues. But I don't know what it's like to work in these organisations on a day-to-day basis. So maybe that's one for you. What do you think these kind of pressures do to a workplace?

No, I think it's, I mean, on the one hand, you want to strive for excellence and do really good work, at the same time, you want to give people the opportunity to make mistakes. And provide that kind of psychological safety, which is important for creativity, and so on. So it's a finely balanced thing. But you know, some companies, I think McKinsey, has said, that they hire insecure overachievers, you know, kind of perfectionists.

Yeah, I mean, look, there's no doubt that there is a certain degree of perfectionism that I can understand. Firms looking for. It wouldn't necessarily be the fear that's conducive to the performance, but the anxiety that goes underneath some of the efficiency tendencies can push people really far. Like, I speak from personal experience in this, by the way, like, you know, I've considered myself to be a perfectionistic person all throughout my 20s. I push myself well beyond comfort in order to be where I am.

It's interesting. I recently spoke with the CEO of Adidas. And he talks about a burnout being a function of people not being themselves, trying to pretend they're somebody else. And I think that's probably related to that as well, so it leads to a lot of burnouts. Now I try to advocate for bringing half-baked ideas, which is not easy to do if you're a perfectionist, I guess.

Because the unknown, right? Like there's too much uncertainty there, you don't know if it's going to work, it's highly likely to fail. That's going to be really tough.

And we also try to call things a pilot if we think it may not succeed, so, for instance, this podcast, it was a pilot. We didn't know whether it was going to fly.

I think that's great, and also it calibrates expectations from the very start if you put too much pressure on something flying from the get-go. There is so much that we can't control about these things too. And I think it's really important to make sure that if we want something to be successful, that we have realistic expectations of everybody on the team.

But can you think of a successful organization which hasn't been perfectionist?

I can't think of a specific organization, but I know that a lot of organizations right now are wrestling with how to create cultures that are different to how they've been structured in the past. There's a kind of ranking, performance-based outcomes and all the rest of it. I know Google experimented with a very radical idea to pay people to fail, to give people money for taking chances and failing. I mean, that's very radical. But what that instilled is a readiness for people to take chances.

So what's the sweet spot here? What should we target? Because getting something 100 right is very, very expensive, right? And the last 10 takes a lot of time and a lot of money, and it's tough. So should we target like 90 good, 85 good, 80 good?

I think it's really difficult to put a number on it because what is 80 good, what is 90 good? I think the best way to think about it is this. Look, when you do any project at work, there's going to be hundreds of ways that are good enough. That's to say, hundreds of ways you can produce that project, that report that is good enough.

Yes, go ahead.

Because you were going to ask me a question here about CEOs, and I'm really interested in that. Because I was like, Well, if you asked me that question, I wouldn't be able to answer it. But do you think in your world that in order to be a CEO, to get to the very, very top of what is a very elite profession? That you have to have a little bit of perfectionism, because I don't sense in yourself that you have strong perfectionist tendencies. And yet here you are, so I'm wondering your take on this, do you think it's necessary or do you think it's something you could do?

Well, you probably know that I'm not a perfectionist because you may have even read my dissertation, which I wrote at your department at the LSE.

It's interesting, that's really interesting, yeah, and it's so important for someone like yourself to say that. Because I think right now, we have a lay perception. That, you know, you've got to push yourself to the nth degree and that you have to be relentlessly working in order to succeed. And actually, what I hear you saying is that sometimes it isn't just about that almost unrelenting pursuit.

You see, in a way I think it's probably, I think it's counterproductive in another way as well. I think it's about, in my mind, managing an organization. It's about seeing the people, and it's about not seeing just the results of what they're doing, but it's trying to see the person. What makes the people tick, thrive? When are they in the flow and try to make sure that they are in that situation as often as possible? Now, if you just focus on the results, and you know, wanting perfect results, you will just not have time and not have the ability to work with them. As people, I think that's very, very important.

Yeah, I'm just listening to music to my ears, because it's really nice to hear somebody like yourself talking these terms. Because I think this is a bit of a paradigm shift that needs to occur that actually you can get, you know, the focus really is on people, right? Like, you know, if you focus too much on productivity and profit margins and all the rest of it, then I think you can easily forget that. There are people underneath those margins that are doing incredible work to make sure that the company grows year on, year, on year. But you've got to look after them, you know? You've got to make sure they're in a safe, comfortable environment where they can feel free to express themselves, their ideas, their risks and all the rest of it. And, you know, I think there's a counterculture occurring, but it's slow to take off.

Is there a link between extremely hard work and perfectionism? Do you have people who work extremely hard who are not perfectionist?

Yeah, they do work extremely hard, but again, it goes back to this paradox, right? They work extremely hard in certain circumstances.

But do you also know people who work extremely hard, who are not particularly perfectionistic?

Yeah, of course. So. People who are conscientious, people who are diligent, people who are meticulous, you know, work exceptionally hard.

Is it linked to grit in any way?

Grit is an interesting I like all Angela Duckworth has done with this aspect of character, purpose and perseverance. I think it's been extremely helpful for a lot of people. Clearly, she's a best-selling author. People seem to resonate with this topic and can see that. Being gritty, resilient, being able to push past adversity, all these things are really positive for performance. But I would say also, Nicolai, everything in moderation, right?

So, Thomas, let's move on now to what to do about it. So let's now assume that I'm a perfectionist. How should I cope with it?

Well, there are many different ways you can think about it from a personal perspective, but also from an organization's perspective. Let's talk about it from a personal first. The key thing is to know that things aren't as bad as what you think they are in your mind. When we talk about the reluctance to let it go, perfectionists find it difficult to let things go. They find it difficult to push themselves into challenging situations.

Well, you say that, but how did you cope with that? I mean, you're a perfectionist, I mean, do you manage to get through these kind of things easily?

No, I don't, and I still struggle. But the key point to this is that you've got to do it anyway. Putting a book out into the world, for instance, it's the hardest thing to do, and the writing? It is so triggering for your perfectionism. Because you want it to be bulletproof, and you want it to go out in the world. And you worry all the time about the feedback that's going to come after.

There is a good rule of thumb here, even if you do something which is absolutely perfect and correct. 10 of people, per definition, will not like it, but always have people not liking what you do.

100%.

That's a really good rule to have.

You cannot please everyone, and there's always going to be bad feedback, there's always going to be criticism. And actually, you know, in many ways, that's a sign that you've been brave enough to put something in the world. For somebody to criticize, like, it's a reinforcement that this is a really difficult and important achievement.

You also talk about self-compassion, what do you put in that?

Well, that's an important component of being brave because you're going to encounter situations where things haven't gone quite so well. If you are willing to put yourself out there. So in those moments, you have to then be very clear to yourself. That this is part and parcel of a learning process, of a growth process. And that instead of going in ourselves, like your perfectionism would tell you to do, how could you be so stupid? What were you thinking?

What parts of perfectionism needs more work and more research?

Those are parts of perfectionism. Nicola, This is a very new area, I think the cultural stuff that you talked about earlier. We need way more on this. I would love to do cross-cultural comparisons of perfectionism to see where levels are higher or lower. I think that would be a fascinating research question.

Well, Thomas, it's been great to have you on the podcast. There is a Japanese aesthetic philosophy, which is called wabi-sabi, which is about the perfect imperfect to celebrate the flaws and the things which are not fantastic. Perhaps that's where we need to go.

This is a philosophy that teaches us there's something beautiful in the broken, in the fragile, in the chinks, the curves and the harsh edges. And that life is finite. We are exhaustible creatures, and we're mere mortals. At the end of the day, there's something quite joyous about that. Actually, knowing those things is incredibly humanizing.

Great place to end, big thank you.

Thank you, Nicola, it's been a pleasure.