You're not a perfectionist. You're just lazy...

0:00 In the summer of 1505,

0:01 a 21-year-old law student named Martin Luther got caught in a thunderstorm

0:05 so violent that he thought he was going to die.

0:07 And in a panic, he screamed out a vow to God.

0:11 Spare me and I will become a monk.

0:13 Martin Luther did survive.

0:15 And two weeks later, to his father's complete and utter disapproval,

0:18 he dropped out of law school and walked into an Augustinian monastery.

0:21 Now, becoming a monk in the 16th century was

0:24 not like signing up for a bougie meditation retreat today.

0:27 It was an entire life of silence, poverty,

0:30 prayer eight times a day, and complete and total obedience.

0:33 But Martin Luther didn't just follow the rules.

0:36 He obliterated them.

0:38 He fasted for days.

0:40 He slept through freezing winter nights without a blanket.

0:43 He whipped himself actual self flagagillation as penance for his sins.

0:48 He confessed up to 6 hours at a time, dissecting every thought.

0:52 His confessor literally refused to see him anymore because he was too much.

0:57 The other monks would confess that they stayed up

1:00 past lights out or coveted somebody else's potato salad.

1:03 But this guy, this guy Luther, he was in there for half the day cataloging

1:09 sins so microscopic that they barely qualified his thoughts.

1:12 Eventually, his supervisor, Johan Von Stopitz,

1:16 pulled him aside and told him, "Look, we have to have a bro talk." He said,

1:20 "True repentance, my friend, is not self-imposed punishment.

1:23 It's a change of heart." But Martin Luther did not listen.

1:26 And he later said, "If anyone could have earned heaven by the life of a monk,

1:30 it was me." He confessed to hating God because no matter how much he suffered,

1:34 it was never enough to feel worthy.

1:36 His breakthrough, the insight that would literally split

1:39 the Christian church in half and reshape Western civilization,

1:43 it only came when he finally stopped.

1:45 When he finally accepted that he could not

1:47 make himself perfect and that no amount of self-inflicted

1:50 pain would close the gap between who he was and who he thought he should be,

1:55 that's when his mind finally opened up.

1:57 And that's when his real work began.

2:00 And he's not the only one.

2:01 If you've ever felt like a perfectionist,

2:03 if you ever worn perfectionism like a badge of honor and told yourself

2:08 that your relentless self-criticism is what makes you so good at what you do,

2:12 you might be full of just without the whip.

2:15 In this video, I want to break down

2:17 why perfectionism is secretly a form of laziness.

2:20 Why being hard on yourself is a low-key addiction.

2:23 And like all addictions, it keeps you stuck until you're able to replace

2:27 it with something that actually helps you produce great work.

2:32 All right, you know how this works.

2:34 You start a project, you work on it for a few weeks, maybe a few months,

2:38 but you never really show it to anybody because it's not ready yet.

2:42 And by ready, we mean it's not perfect.

2:45 And then you reach a point where you realize

2:47 it will never live up to what you had imagined.

2:49 And then you get really upset.

2:50 And then you lay awake at night.

2:52 And then you cry yourself to sleep.

2:53 And then you get angry and eat a whole tub of ice cream.

2:56 And then you abandon it and give up.

2:58 And not only that, then you beat yourself up for abandoning it for weeks,

3:02 for months, for years.

3:04 So your life becomes this steady cycle of starting, agonizing, quitting,

3:09 and then self-punishment without a single result to show for it.

3:12 The perfectionism that's supposed to make you great is

3:15 the very thing keeping you from doing anything at all.

3:18 Now, think about what's actually happening when you

3:20 beat yourself up after a failure like this.

3:22 You feel terrible.

3:23 You ruminate.

3:24 You replay the mistake over and over in your head.

3:27 You tell yourself, "You should have done better.

3:29 It wasn't good enough.

3:30 You should have known better.

3:31 You're going to do better next time." And that process,

3:34 that agonizing self-critical spiral, it feels productive.

3:40 It feels like accountability.

3:43 It feels like you're taking the failure seriously, like you're improving,

3:47 like you're learning, but you're not doing a thing.

3:51 You're being lazy.

3:52 You're not fixing any problem.

3:54 You're not taking any action.

3:56 You're not shipping any work.

3:58 You're just suffering.

4:00 And that suffering becomes a kind of emotional currency.

4:03 Like you've paid for your failure by feeling bad about it.

4:07 And once you've paid enough with bad feelings, then well,

4:11 you don't have to change anything cuz you already paid for it.

4:14 It's basically penance over progress.

4:17 It's self- flagagillation instead of self- congratulation.

4:22 You like that one?

4:23 Yeah, it was a good one.

4:25 This is literally what Martin Luther was doing in that monastery.

4:28 He thought that if he suffered enough,

4:30 if he whipped himself enough times and confessed

4:33 enough sins and denied himself enough comfort,

4:35 that eventually he would feel worthy.

4:37 That the pain itself was the path.

4:40 But all the pain did was keep him locked

4:42 in a cycle where nothing ever changed and nothing moved forward.

4:45 So here's what the research actually shows.

4:48 It shows that self- forgiveness, not self-criticism,

4:51 is what reduces the likelihood of repeating bad behaviors.

4:55 A study from Carlton University found

4:56 that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating

4:59 on an exam were significantly less likely to procrastinate on the next one.

5:03 But the students who beat themselves up, who punished themselves,

5:07 they procrastinated just as much, if not more, the second time around.

5:11 This is counterintuitive,

5:12 but it makes perfectionists deeply uncomfortable to hear this because

5:15 the idea that being easier on yourself might make you more productive.

5:20 It feels like cheating.

5:22 It feels like feels like you're robbing somebody.

5:25 Like, no, success isn't supposed to feel easy.

5:28 I'm not supposed to feel good about this.

5:30 It's supposed to be hard.

5:31 I'm supposed to suffer.

5:32 Hustle bros use all these metaphors like you're climbing a mountain

5:36 or you're eating glass or you're like crawling through barb wire.

5:40 What if none of this is true?

5:41 What if just lowering your standards actually results in more productivity?

5:46 What if dropping the bar lower is actually more optimal?

5:50 I think it is.

5:51 And I think this works because it breaks that penance cycle.

5:54 When you stop paying for failure with punishment,

5:57 then you're forced to pay with actual behavioral change.

6:00 You suffer, you feel like you paid, and then you get to stay exactly the same.

6:03 This is why being hard on yourself is actually terrible productivity advice.

6:07 Not because you're suffering.

6:09 You are, but because suffering is the only thing you're doing.

6:13 This video is brought to you by Brain FM.

6:15 So, while I was sitting down to work on this script,

6:17 something came up and I wanted to share it with you.

6:20 I caught myself doing the thing that I'm

6:22 literally telling you not to do in this video.

6:25 I was beating myself up for not having started earlier,

6:28 calling myself lazy, running the whole internal monologue.

6:31 And then I realized that monologue is actually

6:33 the thing that stops me from getting to work,

6:36 which is kind of the whole problem of most focus advice.

6:39 It tells you to try harder, but trying harder is usually what gets in your way.

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7:01 I use it for any session where I need

7:02 to stop thinking about thinking and actually just do the thing.

7:05 It's backed by a PhD research team, peer-reviewed studies,

7:08 and something like two decades of work on how sound can shape your attention.

7:13 And honestly, it's the only audio tool that I've ever

7:15 found that holds up when I'm actually trying to get done.

7:18 You shouldn't have to psych yourself up into your own work.

7:22 Focus should be a tool that you reach for, not a performance you have to put on.

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7:34 So, head over to brain.fm/idga.

7:38 That's brain.fm/idga.

7:40 You can also check out the link in the description below.

7:43 So, stop being hard on yourself and just go get some work done.

7:49 Stanley Kubri is widely regarded as one

7:51 of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived.

7:53 2001 Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining.

7:58 His work is studied all over the world and pretty much every major

8:02 director working today will cite him as one of their most important influences.

8:06 But he was also by virtually every account a nightmare to work with.

8:11 Kubri was famous for demanding dozens,

8:14 sometimes over a hundred takes of a single scene.

8:17 Not because he had a clear vision of what he wanted and needed to get it right,

8:21 but by his own admission, he often didn't know what he wanted.

8:24 He only knew what he didn't want.

8:26 So, he'd shoot and shoot and shoot, scene after scene after scene,

8:31 waiting for something to emerge that met a standard he couldn't articulate,

8:35 but would recognize once he saw it.

8:37 Now imagine imagine working under those conditions.

8:41 Imagine shooting this YouTube video a hundred times.

8:45 How awful would our lives be?

8:48 It would suck.

8:49 Yes.

8:49 Imagine working under these conditions.

8:52 Apparently when they were shooting Eyes Wide Shut,

8:54 Tom Cruz got a stomach ulcer from the stress of working with Kubric.

8:58 But even worse was Shelley Duval during The Shining.

9:01 Kubri put Duval through what can only be described as psychological warfare.

9:06 And I put warfare there just because abuse might get me sued.

9:09 She did 127 takes of the baseball bat scene.

9:14 127.

9:14 Kubri instructed the entire crew not to show

9:17 Duval any sympathy while they were shooting.

9:19 He told them to ignore her completely.

9:22 He never once complimented her performance while

9:24 openly praising Jack Nicholson right next to her.

9:27 Duval started losing her hair from the amount of stress that she was under.

9:31 She was described as being in and out of health throughout the shoot.

9:34 The child actor Danny Lloyd required psychological counseling.

9:37 The shoot was so stressful.

9:39 The funny thing is is that Kubric rejected the label of perfectionist.

9:43 He hated it.

9:43 He didn't think he was being unreasonable.

9:46 He genuinely believed he was serving the work

9:48 and that his refusal to accept anything

9:50 less than whatever undefined vision lived in his head

9:53 was what separated great art from mediocrity.

9:56 And in a certain narrow sense, I mean, I don't know, maybe he was right.

10:01 His films are masterpieces,

10:03 but the human cost of his standards was absolutely enormous.

10:07 And there's a strong argument that Duval would have been just

10:09 as brilliant in 20 takes as she was in 127 of them.

10:13 This is what psychologists call otheroriented perfectionism.

10:16 It's when you impose your own impossibly high standards,

10:20 not just on yourself, but on everybody around you.

10:23 And unlike the self-oriented perfectionist like Martin Luther who

10:27 at least has the decency to suffer in private,

10:30 the other oriented perfectionist exports their suffering onto others.

10:34 And instead of admitting that their impossible standards are the problem,

10:38 they decide everyone else is the problem.

10:40 Now, you probably know a person like this.

10:42 Maybe it's the boss who only tells you what you did wrong,

10:45 never what you did right.

10:46 Maybe it's the partner who interrogates your past because they

10:49 need to verify that you measure up to their standards.

10:52 Maybe you're Asian and you have a mother.

10:55 These people think that they're helping.

10:57 They frame their impossible standards as love, as commitment,

11:01 as I just want the best for you.

11:03 And that framing makes their behavior almost impossible to challenge.

11:07 Because who's going to argue against wanting the best for someone?

11:10 But what they're actually doing is making intimacy almost impossible.

11:13 You can't be close to someone who's constantly measuring

11:16 you against an ideal that you will never reach.

11:19 You can't trust someone who treats your imperfections as problems

11:22 to be solved rather than parts of you to be accepted.

11:26 The other oriented perfectionist standards don't elevate the people around them.

11:30 They suffocate them.

11:31 And this other oriented perfectionism

11:33 like self-oriented perfectionism is also lazy.

11:38 Yes, in a sense I am calling Stanley Kubri lazy because instead

11:42 of doing the difficult work of understanding the needs and desires of others,

11:46 learning how to find common ground and compromise,

11:49 you simply bulldoze other people's perspectives with your own.

11:52 Other oriented perfectionism is strictly authoritarian

11:55 in that there is never room for compromise.

11:58 What's worse is that this form of perfectionism has been on the rise.

12:01 A metaanalysis by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill at the University

12:04 of BAF covering 41,000 college students across the US,

12:08 Canada, and UK found that other oriented perfectionism has increased by 36%.

12:13 So we're not just getting harder on ourselves,

12:15 we're also being harder on each other,

12:17 which if you've been on Twitter at all in the last 15 years,

12:20 will not surprise you.

12:24 I want to wrap up with a story that I love.

12:27 So in 1935, World War II was clearly on the horizon.

12:31 And the British government asked a number of physicists and engineers

12:34 to uh develop some way to detect bombers coming across the English Channel.

12:40 And there was one physicist named Robert Watson Watt who happened

12:43 to figure out that radio waves could be used to detect incoming aircraft.

12:47 The technology of radar did not exist

12:49 at the time and the threat was existential.

12:52 So time was running out.

12:53 The funny thing about Watson Watt though was that he had this interesting

12:57 philosophy that he called the cult of imperfection and it went like this.

13:01 He said you should always go with the third best option.

13:05 The first best option doesn't actually exist and the second

13:08 best option takes too long to get to.

13:10 The psychologist Barry Schwarz calls this difference

13:13 between people who chase the first best option and people who chase

13:16 the third best option maximizers and satisficers.

13:20 A maximizer is someone who needs to explore

13:23 every possible option before making a decision.

13:26 They need everything to be perfect.

13:28 They're the person who spends three

13:30 hours reading mattress reviews, buys the mattress,

13:32 then keeps reading mattress reviews because what if they got the wrong one?

13:36 But a satisficer is just someone who lays down

13:39 in the mattress store and waits until they fall asleep.

13:42 Now, here's what's wild.

13:43 You would think that the maximizer,

13:45 the person who does all the extra research that agonizes over every detail,

13:49 that they would actually end up with better outcomes in life,

13:52 that they would do better work,

13:53 they would achieve more success, they would have better results.

13:56 It turns out they don't.

13:57 Schwarz found that not only do maximizers often have worse outcomes,

14:01 but they are consistently less happy with their outcomes

14:03 even when they do make a better choice.

14:06 Read that again.

14:07 Oh, I'm not reading.

14:09 Okay.

14:11 In other words, even if the Maximizer does get a better mattress,

14:14 they still feel worse about it

14:16 because the Maximizer's brain never stops comparing, it's never done shopping.

14:20 There's always another option they didn't consider.

14:23 There's another review that they didn't read.

14:25 There's another version of reality that they chose differently,

14:28 and everything was perfect in that reality.

14:30 Why didn't they choose that one?

14:32 Sound familiar?

14:33 But here's the tricky thing.

14:34 A maximizer on the surface looks

14:36 like they're pursuing excellence, but they're not.

14:40 Really, what they're pursuing is a lack of regret,

14:43 which spoiler alert, that's not really something you can completely eliminate.

14:47 It comes with being a person.

14:49 Satisficers, on the other hand, are not settling.

14:52 That's a misconception that a lot of people have.

14:54 Oh, you're just lowering your standards.

14:56 You're settling.

14:57 No, what a satisficer is doing is that they

14:58 are looking for the exact threshold that is good enough.

15:01 They just need what works.

15:03 They don't need the best because they understand that the best takes too long.

15:07 And because they're not trapped in an infinite comparison loop,

15:10 they actually get done and then feel good about it.

15:12 Watson Watt understood this instinctively.

15:15 He was a satisficer.

15:16 His radar system was clunky.

15:18 It was imprecise.

15:18 It had significant limitations, but it was also deployed in time.

15:22 Like they actually used it to prevent

15:24 the Luwaffa from bombing in the Battle of Britain.

15:26 They gave the RAF enough warning to scramble fighters and defend the country.

15:30 Imperfect radar helped win the war.

15:32 Perfect radar wouldn't arrive for another 10 years.

15:35 Jeff Bezos has a great version of this as well.

15:38 He once told Amazon shareholders that he believes optimal decisions

15:41 happen when you have 70% of the information you need.

15:45 Less than 70% you'll probably make a bad call.

15:48 More than 70% and you probably wasting time gathering

15:51 data that it's not going to change the outcome.

15:53 And this is the secret advantage

15:55 that satisfers have that maximizers don't realize.

15:58 By shipping at 70% you gain way more information about what

16:03 works and what doesn't so that you can iterate and try again.

16:07 But maximizers because they never try the first time they never

16:10 get that information back and so they end up falling behind.

16:13 Now obviously this applies to a lot more than business decisions.

16:17 In writing I'll hand a draft to an editor when

16:19 it's probably around 70 80% of where I want it.

16:22 Not because I don't care,

16:23 but because I know that the last 20% is going to be better addressed with real

16:27 feedback from another person than just a month of me sitting alone in a room.

16:32 The perfectionist hears this and panics.

16:34 But what if the 70% version is embarrassing?

16:36 What if people judge me?

16:38 What if it's not good enough?

16:39 But that panic is the tell because the fear isn't really about the quality.

16:43 It's about the vulnerability.

16:45 Shipping something imperfect means exposing

16:47 yourself to the possibility that it's

16:49 not good enough and by extension that you're not good enough.

16:53 So you keep polishing, tweaking,

16:54 and delaying not because the work needs it, but because you do.

16:58 You need the illusion that if you just work a little harder,

17:01 suffer a little more, hold yourself to a slightly higher standard,

17:04 you can eliminate the risk of being seen as imperfect.

17:07 But you can't.

17:08 That risk is always going to be there.

17:10 So how do you become more of a satisficer?

17:13 Well, what researchers have found is that you

17:15 decide the criteria before you start the task.

17:18 You don't do it during, you don't do it after, you do it before.

17:21 You write down what good enough looks

17:23 like when you're calm and rational about it.

17:26 And then you commit to it.

17:27 Now, the perfectionists resist this because defining good

17:30 enough in advance just feels like giving up.

17:33 It feels like a copout.

17:34 But it's actually the opposite.

17:35 It's the only way to free yourself from the prison of infinite comparison.

17:39 It's how you escape the monastery.

17:41 Now, the ultimate solution to perfectionism isn't necessarily getting rid of it.

17:45 It's just reorienting your understanding of what perfect actually means.

17:49 That beautiful vision in your head, the one where the project is flawless,

17:54 the relationship is seamless, the body is ideal,

17:57 the career is absolutely spotless, that's not perfection.

18:01 That's a fantasy.

18:02 And you know what confusing a fantasy with reality is?

18:06 It's lazy.

18:07 It's a lack of mental awareness and mental effort.

18:10 Real perfection is a process.

18:13 It's the act of getting something out there,

18:15 having it criticized, failing, and then improving upon it.

18:19 It's what Watson Watt did with the radar.

18:21 It's what Luther did with his theology.

18:24 He stopped trying to be worthy,

18:25 and just started doing the work that actually mattered.

18:28 So, yes, strive for greatness, strive for quality.

18:31 Hell, strive for perfection if you feel like it.

18:33 But understand that the path there runs through imperfection,

18:37 through the 70% version of it,

18:39 through the failure that teaches you something the fantasy never could.

18:42 Because here's what 500 years of history keep telling us.

18:45 From a freezing monastery in a furt to the battle of Britain,

18:49 suffering is not the same thing as progress.

18:51 Punishment is not the same thing as discipline.

18:53 And being hard on yourself is not the same thing as being good to yourself.

18:57 In fact, it's usually just the opposite.