The Perils of Perfectionism

I have always been a perfectionist. For most of life, this was a useful trait—it pushed me to work hard and do my best work all the time. But as my courses have gotten harder, my perfectionism has started to cause more problems for me. In high school and now also in college, I have taken more classes that pushed me outside of my comfort zone. This has afforded me valuable opportunities to grow, but it has also meant that I have been taking classes in which I don’t already have the skills to excel. The nature of my perfectionism is such that if I don’t know how to do something perfectly, I have a very difficult time getting myself to even start working on it. Because of this, the only thing I’ve learned how to excel at is procrastination.  Taken to the extreme, this has led to times where I just didn’t submit assignments because I knew that I wouldn’t have been able to do them perfectly. Intellectually, I know that submitting an assignment even if it’s not perfect is better than getting a zero. I have done the calculations to prove this, and in most cases where I didn’t turn in an assignment, my grade would have been substantially better even if I had gotten a 50% rather than a 0%. Despite seeing these numbers though, I still can’t get myself to believe that not only is turning in an imperfect assignment better than not turning it in at all, but even that it’s okay to turn in an assignment that isn’t perfect.