The Perfection Paradox

Photo credit: Christophe Meneboeuf

You know all about this paradox, even if you didn’t know it had a name. The perfection paradox is a term that describes what happens when a person prevents themselves from performing a certain activity simply for fear of doing it imperfectly. Essentially, it’s a failure to launch yourself out of your comfort zone.

Let me explain with a lesson from my own life. Over thirty years ago as an undergraduate at UF in Gainesville, Florida, I took Modern Greek for two semesters. I was thrilled to be learning the easier version of the ancient language I had been studying as a Classics major. I was doubly excited because I had planned a trip to Greece that summer and now I could feasibly converse with the population in their own language.

But, to my frustration, once I got there I repeatedly stopped myself from even trying to speak Greek to the Greeks even though I theoretically knew how to say what I wanted to say! I was so afraid I would use the wrong tense or the wrong word that I would revert to English. At some point, I got fed up with this fear and made a vow from that day forward to use only Greek to Greek speakers, regardless of how ridiculous I thought I sounded to them.

And you know what happened? Everybody understood me. My Greek got better. And I realized how much time I had wasted because of my fear of imperfection.

I learned a valuable lesson then: The uncomfortable feeling of doing something imperfectly is necessary for perfection. Therein lays the paradox.

If you recognize this paradox in your own life, become aware of it and do the thing anyway!