Yash Sodhi says he worked for three months straight in a former life as an investment banker.
They struggled to work out when their work was “good enough”, which meant they often spent too much time getting it to a standard higher than it needed to be. “It’s striving, but it’s striving with a lot of baggage, and that baggage comes in the way of insecurity and self-criticism,” Curran tellsHe says the difference between healthy striving and unhealthy perfectionism is that, when we stray into the latter, we are unable to divorce our sense of self-worth from the outcomes we are achieving.But various studies have found that it is associated with higher rates of clinical depression, anorexia nervosa, suicidal ideation and early death.
“You’ll find that actually it wasn’t as bad as you think it was going to be, most of the time. And that can feel like taking a sledgehammer to perfectionism,” Curran says.For organisational psychologist Amantha Imber, a useful strategy to prevent the pursuit of high standards morphing into unproductive perfectionism is to shoot for 80 per cent rather 100 per cent.