The work is not ready. It has been not ready for six months. In those six months it has been revised thirty times, each revision bringing it technically closer to completion and psychologically no closer to the threshold of being shareable. The not-readiness is not about quality. The work is good. The people who have seen portions of it have said it is good, and you can assess it clearly enough to know they are not simply being kind. The work is good and it is not ready, and the reason it is not ready is not anything that more revision will fix, because the not-readiness is not a feature of the work. It is a feature of the relationship between the self and the threshold of visibility that the work represents. The perfectionism that is keeping the work not ready is not a quality standard. It is a protection strategy. It is the loop running its most sophisticated available mechanism for preventing the exposure: the standard that is always just slightly higher than whatever the current version of the work has achieved.
Brené Brown’s research on perfectionism distinguishes it precisely from the healthy striving that it masquerades as. Healthy striving is self-focused: how can I improve this? Perfectionism is other-focused: what will they think of this? The distinction is the distinction between the standard as a tool for developing the work and the standard as a shield against the verdict that the work’s visibility would invite. The perfectionist is not working to make the work better. They are working to make the work invulnerable to criticism, to close off every avenue through which the external verdict could find a point of entry. The invulnerability project is endless because invulnerability is not achievable. Every piece of work, no matter how developed, retains the openness to criticism that any visible thing retains.
The developmental origins of perfectionism are the developmental origins of the competence strategy, extended to the creative domain. The child whose love was conditional on performance, who learned that the acceptable version of the self was the excellent version, who discovered that adequacy was insufficient to hold the connection that the full self required, installs the perfectionism as the logical extension of that learning: if good enough was never good enough, then perfect must be the threshold. The perfect threshold is set at the level that the management program assesses as sufficient to guarantee the connection, to prevent the withdrawal, to produce the approval that the conditional love made the condition of safety. The problem is that the perfect threshold is set by the working model from the original room, not by any objective standard of quality.
The specific experience of perfectionism in the creative process has a recognizable phenomenology that distinguishes it from genuine quality assessment. Genuine quality assessment produces completion: the sense that the work has reached a level at which it is ready to be received, not because it is flawless, but because it has achieved what it set out to achieve. Perfectionism produces the opposite: the sense that the work is almost there but not quite, the specific quality of the almost that does not reduce with revision because the almost is not a measure of the work’s current state. It is a permanent feature of the perfectionist’s relationship to any work that is approaching the threshold of visibility. The almost arrives at approximately the same point in every creative process: the point at which the work is sufficiently developed to be assessed and insufficiently developed to be invulnerable. The perfectionism activates here, every time, with a reliability that confirms its function: it arrives precisely when the work is about to be visible.
The financial expression of perfectionism follows the same logic. The business that has been planned for two years and has not launched because the plan is not yet perfect. The product that has been developed and refined and developed further and is not yet at market because there is always one more element that needs to be addressed before launch. The career move that has been contemplated and researched and prepared for and has not been made because the conditions are not yet quite right. In every case, the perfectionism is performing the same function: keeping the self and the work at the safe distance from the visibility threshold where the actual assessment of the actual world would occur. The assessment is the thing that is being avoided. Not because the assessment would be negative — often the person with the unlaunchable business is genuinely skilled and the assessment would be positive — but because the assessment, whatever its valence, would be real.
The path through perfectionism is not the path of lowering the standard. The standard is not the problem. The standard is often genuinely high and genuinely appropriate. The path is the separation of the quality standard from the visibility standard: the recognition that ready does not mean invulnerable and that the readiness of the work for visibility is not the same as the work’s invulnerability to criticism. Every piece of work that has ever mattered has been visible and vulnerable. Vulnerability is the condition of the mattering. The work that is made invulnerable by the perfectionism’s endless revision is the work that cannot matter, not because it is insufficient but because it has never been allowed to be in the relationship with the reader or the viewer or the listener that would allow the mattering to occur. The ready is now. The fear is the signal that the readiness is real.