Book of the Week: The Pursuit of Perfect

16 Oct 2014

As a follow-up to Happier, I read The Pursuit of Perfect. The book is structured in the same way as Happier. It has 3 sections with embedded exercises. This book expands more on the perfectionist who lives the rat race rather than looking at the world as an optimalist. The second section talks about how pursuing perfect can affect education, work and love. If you’re a parent, the education section is a good read. If you got messed up by the school system, it would also be a good read. Tal references Jim Collin’s Built to Last for the work related ideas. Patterns emerge on what is required to be happy and genuinely good at something after reading many books on happiness, creativity and greatness. The hard part is internalizing those patterns and incorporating them into your everyday life. Perfectionist vs Optimalist The Perfectionist | The Optimalist
—|—
Journey as a straight line | Journey as an irregular spiral
Fear of failure | Failure as feedback
Focus on destination | Focus on journey and destination
All-or-nothing thinking | Nuanced, complex thinking
Defensive | Open to suggestions
Faultfinder | Failure as feedback
Fear of failure | Benefit finder
Rigid, static | Adaptable, dynamic
The perfectionist is the person who has big goals and relentless pursues them, working themselves into the ground. They head from milestone to another milestone never being happy. When they reach their first failure, they get hit hard and breakdown. They can’t enjoy the journey, because they are rushing toward the destination. They make their decisions around avoiding failure instead of doing what they really want. Safe Place In in a study about organization behavior, Hospitals that had better teamwork had more reported medical errors. This was because those who had better teamwork were more likely to report errors. While the others were more likely to cover up errors. When you analyzed errors that you can’t cover up, like deaths, then the hospitals with better teamwork came out on top. As repeated in books I’ve read about creativity and successful companies, you need to create a place where people feel that they can fail safely. If you never fail, you will never achieve great things. How you deal with failure can change your life a lot.