Breaking Free from Perfectionism

How Learning to Fail Helped Me Find Peace

I am a recovering perfectionist.

There, I said it. I was the one who nitpicked font colors in PowerPoint and meticulously removed double spaces in emails. I would reread everything ten times to make sure it was right, then kick myself when I later found a mistake.

Growing up, I tried to be perfect for my parents. They struggled so much coming to America that I had a hard time with the thought of letting them down. We lived in South Carolina, where less than 1% of the population was Asian American at the time. My parents constantly reminded me that because few had ever met people like us, everyone would judge every Asian based on my behavior. I felt pressure to be the picture-perfect little girl, terrified that anything less would make our whole town think less of a group of people I represented poorly.

This led to deep anxiety in high school. I remember having panic attacks but hiding them from my parents because I didn't want to worry them. I constantly felt a sense of dread that I was letting everyone around me down if I was not perfect. I had to be the best and never let it seem like I didn’t have it together.

"Perfectionism is not about doing things perfectly. It is about finding faults easily." I saw this quote online and wrote it down. I've since come back to it multiple times because it so perfectly captures my lived experience. I found fault not only with myself but with those around me. I was constantly in a state where nothing felt good enough.

Breaking Perfection Down

Once I had kids, I realized I had to try something different. No one is the perfect parent. Everyone learns on the job, and everyone messes up sometimes. David and I agreed that we would back each other up unconditionally (sometimes even through gritted teeth) and apologize to our children when we made mistakes. It was important that they see their parents acknowledge their faults.

The most humbling thing about having kids was feeling like I was always falling short. Rather than regret it, I vowed to look forward and do better. In Carol Dweck's 2007 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she discusses studies where students were given a hard task. Afterward, some were told they were smart while others were praised for being hardworking. Those deemed smart sought out less difficult follow-on tasks, whereas those told they were hardworking chose harder challenges. If you're labeled as smart, you don't want to lose that status by performing worse at a harder task. But if you're known for being hardworking, your self-conception is that you can take on more and do more.

Being smart is binary - you either are or aren't. Being hardworking is a skill to be learned and mastered. That's why one way to break out of perfectionism and imposter syndrome is to redefine yourself as someone who is hardworking and on a path of learning.

Learning to Fail

Those who succeed must first learn to fail. Last year, while speaking at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in Professor Daisy Lovelace’s class, I was asked a question about failure by the students. Many of the MBA students were early in their careers and hadn't seen much adversity. What they didn't realize is that you learn more from failure than from success. You can be successful by being lucky, but failure is a crucible that focuses you. You can work your hardest and still fail. Ultimately, it's how you deal with failure that leads to long-term success.

When I was growing up, there was a social and ecological experiment called Biosphere 2. Though it sounds like a sci-fi horror film, it was actually a real 3-acre structure built in Oracle, Arizona in the late 1980s. Scientists put teams of people and various biomes inside the structure, but both attempts at creating a self-sustaining environment failed. Like astronauts, those who applied had to commit to two years inside. Eight people were sealed in.

One curious thing scientists noticed was that trees in the Biosphere grew very quickly but would suddenly fall over. The explanation? To grow tall and strong, trees need harsh conditions. Without wind or lashing rain in the Biosphere, the trees never developed "stress wood." Without this strengthening component, they couldn't become tall and resilient.

Stress wood forms because of difficult environments, just as a person's true character emerges not when things are easy, but when they're hard. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor." It's our failures and struggles that make us strong.

Recovering from Perfectionism

For years, my husband, David, would not allow me to track my food even though I really wanted us to do it together. He knew that if I did, I would become obsessed with it. I tried for a time, but he was right. I was constantly worried about writing down every morsel so much so that I was not eating because I wasn't sure how to track something.

Both of us have addictive personalities. Our jobs have been to keep each other from starting something that would take us down the rabbit hole. I have been tracking my intermittent fasting as a way to keep myself accountable, but when I held onto my communion a bit too long so as not to have to turn off the clock before, he called me out.

The path to recovering from perfectionism isn't about becoming perfectly imperfect - it's about finding grace and forgiving yourself when things aren't perfect. It's about skipping a week of writing when you don't feel up to it. It's about taking communion even when your clock says you aren't at time. It's about letting go of the things that don't matter in the grand scheme of life.

Like those trees in the Biosphere, we need some stress to grow strong, but too much rigidity makes us brittle and weak. True growth comes from learning to bend without breaking and growing tall thanks to failure and stress. We're all works in progress and being perfectly imperfect is perfectly fine.