Make haste slowly. Find a happy medium.
One of the things I have slowly, painfully learned is that perfectionism is poison to me. On the surface, the pursuit of perfection doesn't sound like such a bad thing. Striving to achieve the best results possible sounds like it would produce an excellent work ethic. I run into an insurmountable problem, however: Perfection is impossible. In an attempt to be reasonable, I qualify my goal by changing it into "doing the best that I can." Sadly, that doesn't fix everything, as two rather large flaws tend to trip me up.
First off, "the best that I can" is an extremely subjective goal -- for that matter, so is perfection. It's generally left up to my judgement to decide what my best is. Most people are overly optimistic about their own abilities, so it's easy to overestimate my capabilities, and I'm aware of the fact, so I tend not to trust myself as a judge of myself; I can never decide if I'm being too harsh or too lenient with myself.
It's no surprise that I have always enjoyed those subjects which have concrete standards; I loved solving math problems in high school because of the intense satisfaction I got when an answer was provably correct. English classes quickly lost their appeal for me, despite a lifelong love of language and a childhood wish to become a novelist, because I disliked the subjectivity inherent in the analysis of someone else's work.* However, a difficulty I have found in choosing to spend my time working in a field where "right" and "wrong" are relatively clear-cut is that it's entirely possible for me to find myself empirically wrong. When I have specifications and my software does not act in the manner described by those specifications, it
does not work -- no question about it. That's humbling. In the pursuit of perfection (even limiting that to personal perfection), it can be absolutely demoralizing. Without solid data in front of me showing me that my failure rate is acceptable, my instinct is to see any failure as a complete failure and therefore completely unacceptable. Perhaps it is immodest of me to mention it, but I rarely ran into the situation where I was clearly wrong in my coursework until I went to college. Once academic** challenges regularly cropped up, it was humbling, to say the least; I had little experience dealing with the feelings which resulted from making mistakes or struggling and therefore lacked appropriate coping mechanisms, so I shut down completely and launched myself into the first depressive episode that landed me with a mood disorder diagnosis.
I've been chipping away at my black-or-white thought habits for well over a year now, but it's not easy. It comes back to trusting my judgement about what my potential is and how close I've come to meeting it with each effort I make. This leads me to the second flaw I face when I decide to aim for my personal best: my personal best varies with circumstances. Upon reflection, this flaw is really a simple extension of the first. I not only have to judge what would be an acceptable success rate (it sounds much better when I don't focus on the failures) for my performance on a task, I have to adjust that rate to account for my limited resources of time and energy. Those resources are constantly in flux, so the job of becoming a good estimator becomes amazingly complex, even for relatively familiar tasks. One way I'm trying to cope with that uncertainty is to break tasks down to extremely small chunks and attempt to be as conservative as possible in my estimates. That way I get to set goals that I can actually accomplish, which is intensely satisfying and improves my mood drastically.
March was a month in which I became frustrated with this technique and how long it can take for me to make progress using it. Never mind that rushing ahead under full steam typically ends with a crash for me, it feels amazingly reassuring to see how much I can accomplish in the beginning of a new venture. New exercise regimes are particularly tempting to me and I cannot count the number of times I've thought about my ideal exercise schedule and then attempted to implement it, only to fail within the first few weeks because I've been too ambitious.
Make haste slowly. Find a happy medium.
Those are my mantras these days in an effort to avoid overloading myself and dooming myself to inevitable failure in attaining my personal goals. Patience does not come naturally to me, and something about March with its change in the weather (and my birthday -- always a time for reflection) sparked a particular impatience in me, which was reflected throughout my journal entries for the month.
I'll be back at some point in May to write about whatever April topic catches my fancy.
*I now realize that finding supporting evidence for my analysis could be a very satisfying challenge, and my younger sister has led me to understand that my experience of the work is valid, so I suppose I could have approached those assignments I used to hate as deeply personal and been better able to live with myself. I still don't hold with the practice of ascribing intentions to a creator and always feel the need to hedge my bets and avoid declarations, which leads to wishy-washy and verbose statements.
**My self-worth is highly tied to academics. I could write an entire post, or perhaps even a series of posts about why that's the case, but I will leave that aside for the present.
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