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June 9, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:57
1386 Death by Perfectionism
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Thank you to those who gave the kind and positive feedback on the last video I did on failure.
This is one on perfectionism, which I hope you will find equally helpful.
Now, perfectionism is, to me, as retarded and counterproductive an answer to the question of excellence as religion is to the question of the origins of life, the universe, and everything.
It is a non-answer, but it is obscured as a pseudo-answer, which means it's actually an anti-answer.
It's like here we draw the line called perfectionism, and we say now we have solved the problem of excellence, and excellence is...
Getting everything perfect.
And that, my friends, is a catastrophic lie.
Perfection is the enemy of the good.
Perfectionism is the enemy of excellence.
So let me start with an example.
Last week, for about five days, we had 35 or so listeners up to our house here in the central compound in Mississauga.
And we had a great time.
And before people came over, I really, really had to mow the lawn.
And I did so.
The normal residue of mowing the lawn is all the grass, you know, that lies up and down in strips up and down the lawn.
And so I was raking that in before people came over.
And the reason I was raking it in was so people didn't track it into the house and, you know, clean the floors and all that sort of stuff afterwards.
And it struck me when I was doing my raking that that really is an endless task.
If you want it to be, it can be a completely endless task because there's always going to be more bits of mown grass stuck into the grass.
Every time you rake, more grass comes flying up and you can get the majority of it done, but you really could become obsessive about that.
And I was sort of thinking about that in the realm of Of perfectionism.
Like imagining some sergeant major lawnmower dude going up and down saying, you missed, there's grass here and I see grass here and I see grass here and getting all kinds of tense about it.
And so I was sort of thinking about why perfectionism in the realm of raking your lawn is such a bad idea.
And I think I came up with something useful and hopefully it will be helpful to you.
We all have this in every area of our lives.
We want to do well, I think.
We want to Have good outcomes and so on, but perfectionism renders that so often either impossible or if not impossible, but attainable.
The feeling of satisfaction and of accomplishment lasts a very short time and then we're back into looking for the next little bit of perfectionism that might be rolling along to demand or time, attention, energy and lifespan.
So I was raking, of course, and I thought to myself, OK, it's always good to look at means and ends when you're interested in living a remotely enlightened life.
And so I thought, OK, well, why am I raking?
Well, I'm raking because people are coming and they're going to, you know, track stuff in and out of the house, perhaps, and so on.
And I don't want their shoes to get all covered in grass and so on.
So there is a sort of bell curve, right?
I'm very big on the bell curves.
So if I don't rake at all, there'll be lots of grass on people's shoes.
If I rake too obsessively, then I actually will be more worried about the grass than my guests, which scarcely seems to be the point.
Or I'm going to end up raking too often over a certain patch rather than getting the lawn as a whole done and all of these sorts of things, right?
So it's all about a bell curve, right?
No effort means lots of grass all over the place.
Too much effort means that I'm not actually achieving the end, which is to enjoy the social gathering.
So I was sort of looking at that and thinking, well, you know, I could get all kinds of mad at myself for not raking as well as I could or for missing parts.
But that's not the point, right?
The point of what I'm doing is not to rake up leaves.
That is a means to an end, which is to have the lawn relatively not strewn with bits of dead grass so that people can, you know, walk in and out and enjoy it and so on.
And so the enjoyment of my guests was More important than obsessively raking everything I could conceivably get my hands on or going out with some sort of dustbuster and, you know, getting all kinds of Ray Bradbury murderer on the grass's ass.
And so I thought, OK, well, it's the happiness of my guests.
That is important. Well, why is the happiness of my guests important?
Well, because, you know, these are supporters of the show and they've, you know, some of them have donated, though not all, and I want them to really have Christina and I's appreciation.
I want them to meet Isabella and so on.
And so I'll be happy if my guests are happy.
If my guests are morose or neck deep in mown grass, then I won't be happy.
So really, of course, I was mowing the grass to make my guests more comfortable, to make it less work to maintain the house while the guests are coming in and out.
And so ultimately, of course, for my own happiness, right?
And surely, you know, as many philosophers before me have noted, the purpose of life is happiness.
Because happiness is the one thing that we don't do in order to do something else, right?
Like, I went to the dentist today and had my teeth cleaned and so on.
And why did I do that?
Well, because I don't like it when my teeth are yellow or falling out or whatever, right?
I get toothaches. So I go to the dentist in order to avoid the unhappiness and achieve the contentment of healthy teeth and cums.
But we don't say, I need to get happy so I can go to the dentist.
We go to the dentist in order to rake the lawn in order to attain and achieve our own happiness.
So perfectionism is saying that the goal of the task Is excellence within the task itself, right?
Perfectionism says the goal of the task is excellence within the confines of the task itself.
So excellence in raking leaves is getting my lawn completely spotless, which, of course, is impossible.
Every time you rake, you break new grass leaves and grass strands.
So perfectionism is monomaniacal.
It's obsessive compulsive because it says I need to achieve excellence in the realm of mowing and cleaning my lawn.
But this of course is not the case.
The purpose of life is not to have a tidy lawn, right?
It is to achieve happiness.
And if I'm going to judge the efficacy and quality and excellence of what it is that I'm doing, not relative to the standard of happiness, But rather relative to the standard within itself, then I have a yardstick that is not helpful.
In fact, it's counterproductive because it's going to interfere with my happiness, right?
Because perfectionism is also the fantasy that life has infinite resources, right?
That I can get everything ready for a very large and extended house party.
And I can rake and I can shower and I can, you know, be ready and content and happy and receptive for my guests, right?
That there's not if I spend three hours raking my lawn that I'm not giving up on other things, right?
So perfectionism in that realm would have been to take away from excellence in another realm of preparation for the party and so on.
And if the parties, if we're not ready for the guests when the guests come, that it's going to be stressful.
I'm going to be distracted so that I'm not going to enjoy it.
So, right, you see, you have to look at the task that you're doing Relative to the inevitable constraints of life and that everything we do is something we don't do.
So we're giving up excellence somewhere else in order to achieve excellence here, which means excellence cannot be a universal standard.
It's like saying inhaling is a universal standard.
Well, no, you have to exhale as well.
So it's only half the equation.
And so perfectionism is really to do with where the excellence of your current activity is stacked relative to happiness, to contentment, to peace of mind, to joy, to love, to virtue.
Because that really is the good stuff in life, is the happiness of all of that sort of stuff.
So you don't want to judge your actions relative to themselves.
Because that's just a self-referential mechanism.
It's tautological, fundamentally.
And perfectionism does not place excellence in the higher context of that which we are really supposed to be focusing our demand and desire for quality on, which is happiness and contentment and love and self-esteem and all those kinds of things.
I'm really, really trying to pound this into your head.
I'm sorry if I'm being too repetitive, as usual.
But you want to check what you're doing relative to your larger goals.
Is this adding to my happiness or not?
After a certain amount of time, perfectionism, of course, is going to directly subtract from our happiness.
And that's why perfectionism is such a soft and syrupy trap, right?
It really is quicksand because it starts to take away from our happiness quite considerably because you can't ever get anything perfect.
I can't mow my lawn perfectly, right?
So if I have a standard of perfection for mowing my lawn, everything I do is going to be less than perfect and therefore Perfectionism is actually going to subtract from the happiness of my life, and surely that's really not what we should be doing, is pursuing excellence in a tautological,
self-referential way, or perfectionism only relative to the task that we are currently pursuing, and at the expense of the task which we should actually be pursuing, which is excellence in virtue and happiness and love and honesty and courage and All those kinds of good and juicy things.
So why would we even have this crazy counterproductive idea?
Well, I have a theory, as you can imagine.
Now, when it was last summer we had a barbecue and there were like a third of the people, you know, the show is growing.
And thank you so much, freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.html if you'd like to support the show.
And a few fellows who were friends of ours came early and we were like, oh man, I've still got to trim the, you know, it's all about the lawn, right?
I have to trim the lawn. So if you don't mind, you know, you're welcome to sit and have a drink.
But if you could, you know, do a quick trim along the front there, that would be great.
And these friends did.
And later they said it was really stressful for them because I kept yelling at them.
Take off your shirts and put on this bronzer.
Right. Because they had, you know, dads or whatever, or family members.
I think it was dads who would, you know, say, go do the yard work and would get mad if it wasn't done.
You know, trim. Trim is another thing like Reiki in the lawn.
It can go on and on.
And, you know, you can always get it wrong because there's no such thing as right or perfectly right in that realm.
So perfectionism is also something which bullies use right to attack to have an excuse to aggress against their victims.
Right. You have the standard called of perfectionism.
Right. My own father, when I went to visit him in Africa when I was 16, I just I remember this quite vividly.
It wasn't particularly significant in the moment, but it was, I think.
In that he said to me, don't slurp your soup, right?
Oh no, don't slurp your tea. I was sipping tea and it was hot and I slurped it a little.
He was like, don't slurp your tea, right?
That's rude. And yeah, okay, in a minor way, I can totally understand that.
But in the larger context, you know, this is a guy who left me with So, you know, in terms of politeness and in terms of honorable behavior and virtuous behavior and so on, you know, leaving your kid with a crazy abuser and then sort of standing by when she gets institutionalized and, you know, goes completely nuts and not flying over and sorting it out and so on.
You know, slurping your tea doesn't really seem like a big deal relative to, say, all of those other moral errors, if not crimes, that you might commit in your life.
So again, that's the kind of perspective that goes on where people will try and give you these standards of perfectionism, maybe even things around things like politeness.
And I'm a fan of politeness.
I think it's good. But you have to put it in the context of other values in life, right?
So perfectionism is very often something which is used as an excuse to aggress against those who are under your power.
And because abusers never want to think of themselves as abusers, they have to create some ethical or quality standard to say, well, I'm into excellence, I am into perfectionism, I am a perfectionist, and things must be done right, and you must do things correctly, and I'm only trying to help you really appreciate quality, and so on, right?
But that's all nonsense.
That's all nonsense, and I'll sort of say why, and then we'll wrap it up, and hopefully you found this ramble tangent helpful.
I had about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, we had a sort of an evening gathering here at Casa de Freedom and Radio.
And a fellow came over.
Who said just this, right?
You know, my father was a real perfectionist.
I was very scared because I had to do things just right.
I had to clean my room just so I had to, you know, the vacuum, the had to be sort of the lines, the runner lines had to be aligned and so on.
He had to, he was really in because he was he had very high standards.
He was a perfectionist.
And and so that's that was his justification.
And I said, well, that's interesting.
Would you say that it is good for a father to instill fear in his son?
And he said, well, no, I don't think that is a very good way to be a father.
And I said, well, that's interesting.
So his perfectionism covered the entire gamut of mopping, tidying, vacuuming and yard work or whatever.
But his goal of perfectionism sadly did not cover being a father, a good or great father, because surely that's more important, right?
Being a great father is much, much more important than whether your child is lining up the runners to do the vacuuming or is doing his yard work to some impossible, crazy standard of excellence.
So it's really, really important when you're around people who are perfectionists, or if you're a perfectionist yourself, right?
To me, you've got to fight it like an inner demon.
You've got to take it down. You take it on and take it down because The thing that we really want to aim for excellence in is happiness.
And, of course, the equation that I work with, which goes all the way back to Socrates, Aristotle, and to a smaller degree Plato, reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
If you are rational, if you give up your illusions, then you can be good.
And if you are good, then you are happy.
That's important. Knowledge equals good diet equals health.
Knowledge equals exercise equals health.
You have the knowledge, you have the reason, you have the action, which is the virtue, you have the end result, which is happiness.
And so if we have standards of perfection that cause others to be frightened of us, or if you have people around you who have standards of perfection that cause you to feel frightened, it's really important, I think, to ask them whether their standard of perfection as a parent or a boss involves frightening their children or employees, right? And if they say, yes, the best thing you can do as a parent is to frighten and have your children feel bullied, right?
Then they have a standard of excellence that I think would not stand even the most cursory scrutiny.
But if they are then sort of stop and say, you know what, I don't know why my standard of excellence for yard work is higher, in fact, directly opposed to my standard for excellence as a parent, because surely being a great, benevolent, virtuous and just and noble parent is much more important than whether your weeds are trimmed, are pulled up correctly or whether your hedge is trimmed correctly or things like that.
So I think that we want to make sure that we discard and break out of this prison that says that perfectionism is excellence within the little boxed in confines of a particular task and look at the much broader and much deeper and much richer perspective, which is looking for excellence in virtue and courage and happiness and really letting the goddamn yard worry about itself.
Thank you so much for listening and watching.
I'm trying to keep these short. Please let me know whether you find these helpful.
Otherwise, I'd be more than happy to go back to True News.
And thank you again so much for those who came up.
Thank you so much to my filmmakers.
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