High School Chronicles #2 - Perfectionism

 Nearly everyone would say perfectionism is detrimental: an impossible trait that perpetuates cycles of self-doubt, a futile goal that prevents us from truly learning, a dull lifestyle that degrades the joy of making mistakes. I mostly agree, yet there are caveats.

I'll start with my journey with perfectionism first.

Perfectionism, or at least my version of it, was something I definitely dealt with throughout high school. I've thought a lot about where this comes from, and I feel that I have extracted somewhat of a reason: a constant search for identity. In nearly every social situation, I used to find myself with a need to defend my identity; I was rarely proud of what I could already do.

For most of my childhood, I remember being a competitive year-round swimmer. I was athletic and good at school---that's pretty much it. So when I began to meet people with cool interests and passions in middle school and high school, it was natural that I wanted to have those cool interests and passions, too---who wants to talk about swimming all the time?

The other side to it is that I've always found everything interesting: physics, writing, swimming, rock climbing, coding, music, taekwondo, running, game design, speech and debate, engineering, and everything in between.

Yet the distinction I've never been able to make is learning about new interesting things and excelling at every single new interesting thing. It always seemed to me that everything I couldn't excel at was a fault of my character, yet everything that I was already capable of was insignificant.

My calculus teacher had a poster up in her room that said "Don't strive for perfection, strive for excellence." While this was good advice, I took it to heart in an unintended way: I didn't strive for perfection in every field, but burdened myself with excellence in everything that I did. My version of perfectionism didn't mean zero mistakes, but it meant I worked harder on every aspect of my life to minimize those mistakes.

As one of my friends later told me, this meant that I resisted taking "right turns" along my path; I rarely stopped the grind to explore something new or go down a rabbit hole. I stuck to the road I laid out for myself (see why i stopped using my planner) so that I could excel everywhere.

I'll later write a post about being a jack of all trades, master of none. This was one major consequence of this lifestyle. But I also think that, with some streamlining, this mindset isn't all harmful.

The caveats:

• It's okay to find lots of things cool and interesting. That's how we engage in life! Just draw that distinction between learning about new things but being okay not to know a lot about those things. We can't know everything about everything.
• Find common threads between the varied interests. That's how interdisciplinary interests become powerful and forge superhumans. For me, this came in the form of using physics to improve my swimming, using physics-informed ML to optimize engineering, using debate ideas to communicate and build worldview for applications of my ideas, and finding joy in music or puzzles because of their intuition-building and problem-solving skills that arise in everything I do. Swim built discipline, code built patience, debate built maturity, and playing built confidence.
• Channel that "perfectionist" trait into one or a couple fields rather than everything. Science and engineering especially inherently require some form of perfection; tolerances have to be quite tight when we're building rockets and airplanes, after all. It's not bad to demand nearly perfect results, but that doesn't mean the first iteration has to be perfect, nor does it mean perfection lies in every moment of every day.

Needless to say I've adapted my thinking quite a bit. I love spontaneous side quests and I believe life is quite a bit about playing just as much it is about working.

Still, with the caveats in mind, I feel that striving for excellence nearing perfection isn't fully harmful; it can push us to be the best versions of ourselves.