(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Are you a perfectionist?
Before you shout a resounding "YES!", stop for a moment and reflect. Be careful with the words "perfectionist" and "perfectionism." These words have very specific meanings in industrial psychology that may not reflect your intentions.
Are you:
Perfectionists make unreasonable demands of themselves and their environment. The 'super high standards' of the perfectionist give them an excuse not to fail: since they cannot reach succeess by their own standards, they never really try and can never fail.
Perfectionists obsess over trivial details as a way of avoiding new challenges. A classic perfectionist behaviour is to spend time meticulously optimizing every last line of working code instead of moving on to implement something new.
The key here is not whether optimization is worthwhile, but rather why the perfectionist is spending so much time on it: the perfectionist is afraid of moving forward and uses perfection as justification for holding back. "I'd like to get started on that, but I need to finish this work first."
Another perfectionist behaviour is called "blame and shame": they can't reach their own high standards because of the shoddy work and bad attitudes of their colleagues.
Again, the root motivation is avoiding failure: the perfectionist could write great code, if only her teammates would get their act together. But since her teammates are such shmucks, she spends all her time fixing their code or agitating for new methodologies instead of firing up Emacs and writing code.
Is it wrong to agitate for improvement in your organization? Of course not. But to the perfectionist, it isn't really about improvement, it isn't even about excuses for failure. The perfectionist didn't even try to succeed because she knew that the project could never reach her standards, so she didn't "waste her time" even trying.
This link discusses perfectionism amongst students. You might find it illuminating:
http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content2/perfectionist.k12.4.html
(From the old Joel on Software Forum, with some edits for clarity)
Before you shout a resounding "YES!", stop for a moment and reflect. Be careful with the words "perfectionist" and "perfectionism." These words have very specific meanings in industrial psychology that may not reflect your intentions.
Are you:
- Thorough?
- Detail-oriented?
- Committed to writing solid, bug-free code?
Perfectionists make unreasonable demands of themselves and their environment. The 'super high standards' of the perfectionist give them an excuse not to fail: since they cannot reach succeess by their own standards, they never really try and can never fail.
Perfectionists obsess over trivial details as a way of avoiding new challenges. A classic perfectionist behaviour is to spend time meticulously optimizing every last line of working code instead of moving on to implement something new.
The key here is not whether optimization is worthwhile, but rather why the perfectionist is spending so much time on it: the perfectionist is afraid of moving forward and uses perfection as justification for holding back. "I'd like to get started on that, but I need to finish this work first."
Another perfectionist behaviour is called "blame and shame": they can't reach their own high standards because of the shoddy work and bad attitudes of their colleagues.
Again, the root motivation is avoiding failure: the perfectionist could write great code, if only her teammates would get their act together. But since her teammates are such shmucks, she spends all her time fixing their code or agitating for new methodologies instead of firing up Emacs and writing code.
Is it wrong to agitate for improvement in your organization? Of course not. But to the perfectionist, it isn't really about improvement, it isn't even about excuses for failure. The perfectionist didn't even try to succeed because she knew that the project could never reach her standards, so she didn't "waste her time" even trying.
This link discusses perfectionism amongst students. You might find it illuminating:
http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content2/perfectionist.k12.4.html
(From the old Joel on Software Forum, with some edits for clarity)
Labels: passion
