As a child, I remember taking my teachers’ single-worded comments on my homework very seriously.
“Good!”
“Amazing!”
“Excellent!”
“Perfect!”
To my teacher, they carried more or less the same weight: a quick word of validation for a child’s effort, varying only by the number of exclamation marks following it. To me, they were vastly different. I hated receiving Good. Amazing made me feel seen. But it was always a battle between Excellent and Perfect, 99% and 100%, and subconsciously, I think I still carry that into whatever I do.
The Perfectionist’s Burden – and Its Power
Perfectionism has been framed negatively for a long time. Since the mid-20th century, psychoanalysts have associated it as a maladaptive compensation for deep-seated inferiority. Karen Horney described the Tyranny of the Shoulds: a self-destructive attempt to actualize an idealized, impossibly flawless version of oneself. Perfectionists find themselves fixated on the pursuit of emotional security, their identity reflected back to them by others, telling them whether they are enough.
Leon Garber writes in Psychology Today:
“Perfectionism’s preoccupation with flawlessness raises the question of, “Do others exist solely to reflect your idealized self back to you?” You don’t need to be flawless to be useful, and, in many respects, being flawless can make you completely useless, particularly if others can’t identify with you or if you can’t handle criticism. Some of us may want to be useful so badly that we inadvertently isolate ourselves, due to a mixture of repulsive behavior and our own fears.
So, can we accept whatever contributions we make without needing them to be the best? Can we allow others to decide over and over again if we’re valuable to them? Can we trust that they mean it when they say we are?”
But Katherine Morgan Schafler’s reframe in The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control was more freeing than any recovering perfectionist self-help book I had encountered.
As a perfectionist herself, she acknowledges that we are more aware than anyone else of how unattainable the flawless ideal actually is. But when properly equipped, that awareness turns into a power. Adaptive perfectionism is associated with higher self-regard, greater work engagement, psychological wellbeing, and a problem-focused approach to stress. Perfectionists demonstrate higher motivation, worry less about future performance, and are more optimistic about what they can achieve.
In The Crit, her words came back to me. Perfectionism’s power had been undermined for so long because of the maladaptive desire for control.
And critique, which felt most hostile, became exactly what taught me to start letting go of it.
Good is Good Enough, or Is It?
Having spent most of life as a student, we were trained to excel, to perfect, to always do our best. But there is one strategy students inadvertently develop in order to manage deadlines and one that is far more common in the workplace than anyone admits: satisficing.
Coined by Herbert A. Simon in 1956, satisficing (satisfy + suffice) is a decision-making strategy that aims for an adequate solution rather than the optimal one. In daily life, it means doing just enough to get the job done so you can move on to the next thing.
Taking the urge to excel from school into adult life is one of the more quietly costly things a generation of high achievers did without noticing. For some, that perfectionism failed to make them useful. The gap between the standard they set and the output they could produce in real conditions became a source of paralysis rather than motivation. For others it opened a different kind of door: workplaces that learned to expect more than was reasonable, because the person would always deliver. Until they couldn’t. Satisficing isn’t a failure of ambition. In most cases, it is the more intelligent use of it.
The problem is that satisficing solves a practical problem but not a psychological one. You can satisfice a deliverable. You cannot satisfice a question about your own worth.
The Meaning We Add
In a reflection by Isabella (@isabella.lauren), she asked:
“How often do we make something harder simply because of the meaning we’ve assigned to it?”
This question has stayed with me, particularly as a designer and artist engaging in storytelling, strategy, and making every day.
A sketch is just a sketch until it becomes proof of whether you’re a “real” artist. A first draft is just a first draft until it becomes evidence of whether you have something “worth” saying. The task hasn’t changed. The weight loaded onto it has. And that weight is almost never about the task itself. It is about who we need to be on the other side of finishing it.
This is where perfectionism stops being about standards and starts being about identity. The work becomes a test. And when the work is a test, finishing it means submitting to a verdict. No wonder so many people stay in the drafting stage indefinitely, not because they lack skill, but because not finishing protects the ideal version of both the work and the self from the judgment of reality.
Our skills don’t disappear when we’re not actively using them. They quietly guide our decisions in things that seem entirely disconnected. The capacity we’ve built shows up in how we notice, how we move through problems, how we know when something is off before we can name why. But that capacity can only be discovered in contact with the work. It cannot be confirmed in advance.
“Action creates clarity.” – Unknown
Everyone says to just do it, and while it can feel unhelpful to hear, there is no simpler or more accurate way to put it. Clarity does not arrive before the attempt. It arrives because of it.
The Shift
In the past; in our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, perfectionism was viewed negatively in part because of how society was structured. The primary motivation and raison d’être or ikigai, “reason for being”, came from duty to family and community. When perfectionism demanded you meet a self-set higher standard, you risked becoming the deviant. The one who put personal ambition above collective responsibility.
That scenario has inverted. Hierarchy has flattened. As I wrote in Lens 2, ladders have become circles, but this moment is a further step beyond that: in an era of personal branding and horizontal visibility, the pressure is no longer to conform. It is to be seen, specifically, to be seen as yourself. Be distinct or be invisible.
Perfectionists, properly directed, have the exact disposition to navigate this. The capacity for high standards, self-awareness, and relentless refinement, which once made a person difficult in a conformist structure, is now the very thing that allows someone to stand out naturally. The “flow” states that perfectionism enables are a clear signal.
The Self-Actualization Economy
With so many people living independently, and the criteria for a meaningful life shifting entirely, the values that once grounded previous generations no longer hold the same weight. Work as identity, duty as purpose, contribution as worth: these were not wrong, but they were built for a different structure.
Frank Martela, philosopher and researcher of psychology, identifies three dimensions of meaning in life:
Coherence: life makes sense to you; it isn’t chaotic or unstructured.
Purpose: having goals in the future that give meaning to present activity.
Significance: a felt sense of inherent value or worth to your life.
Significance here is crucial to figure out.
Martela initially understood the foundation of meaning as relational: meaning in life is about making yourself meaningful to other people. Connection, contribution, being seen and understood: these are the conditions under which people feel their lives matter.
And for a long time that was enough. People built careers, raised families, contributed to communities. The framework held on. But something shifted.
More recently, people are leaving decades of accomplished work. Doctors, engineers, scientists, and more decide one day to restart; to open an arts studio, own a farm, get back into dancing; to pursue what actually makes them happy. Many now say they had never really stopped to consider what they liked.
And they couldn’t have. It was a luxury that has now become a necessity.
Employers find younger generations unserious or unambitious because they are no longer willing to attach their worth entirely to their output. The older generation attached their identity to their work so thoroughly, and understandably so, having spent a lifetime building it, that they struggle to recognize a different framework as equally valid.
In the economy of self-realization, it is no longer one person speaking to many. It is many speaking to many. And to be heard, you need to know who you are and what you want to be known for.
This is what Martela later revised his understanding to account for: connecting to others is only one part of meaning. The second is self-realization: the autonomy and competence to pursue what genuinely interests you.
“Meaning in life is about doing things meaningful to you in a way that makes yourself meaningful to other people.” – Frank Martela
Visibility Is Not Popularity
When I think about people who are well-known, who have made a name for themselves and put themselves in front of a public, I used to assume that self-realization came first and visibility followed. That you figured out who you were in private and then shared it once you were ready. However, that was far from true. I have seen so many creatives grow in front of me, which only made them more human in my eyes. Popularity was never a proof of worth or authority, nor a limitation to evolve, as much as the internet has made it seem.
Living in my head was easy. The interior work of self-realization came naturally. I knew what I thought, what I valued, what I was reaching toward. What I struggled with was the second half of Martela’s equation: the connecting outward. The contribution. The willingness to be known rather than simply to know myself.
Which made it all the more striking when I found that many people have been working in exactly the reverse order for years: putting themselves out before they felt ready, finding out who they were through the response, through the friction between what they meant and what someone else received.
Beth (@itsinthebeginning) said simply:
“We’ve started confusing visibility for popularity. You don’t need everyone to know who you are. You just need the right people to know that you exist.”
Visibility is not the reward for self-realization. It is part of the process.
You don’t find out who you are in private and then share it. You find out who you are in the sharing: in the making visible, in the response, in the slow accumulation of evidence that what you think and make and care about is meaningful not just to you, but to someone else.
That is not a destination. It is a practice that will grow alongside you. And it begins the moment you stop waiting to be ready and start letting the right people know that you exist.
Here’s what I’ve been up to:
- Concluding my A1 French language course after 4 months and I finally feel like I’m starting to have a grasp on the language more than ever did in my 9 years of studying it in school and uni. Even though I’m just starting A2, language learning has helped me grasp so much of “just doing it” because speaking a new language is a huge proof that action brings clarity. So many learners prepare for years because they never feel ready. More vocabulary, more grammar, yet never more writing and speaking. However, doing exactly that while not being ready taught me exactly what I needed in order to be ready. Excited to start self-studying again!
- The project case study for my RGD Spring 2026 Mentorship Program, Living in Colour, drops next week. Hope to share everything I learned while leading the art direction for the first time!
- Less than 2 weeks to DesignThinkers Toronto!!! Gonna be my first time attending it. Looking forward to hearing all the talks and connecting with amazing people there!
In The Light
- Alena (IG @createwithalena): a graphic and brand designer I found by chance and noticed how much she changed her surroundings to achieve what she really wanted and how similar our journey has been. Her motto: “a good eye is learned, not born” really resonated with me and I definitely see it in her works. She now shares design concepts and tips with a large community she built.
