effort
John Henryism involves pressure not just to be good but to be impossibly good—superhuman, better than a machine, whether the machine is literal (the steam drill) or figurative (systemic racism).
The Pain of Perfectionism
i do care about excelling at the things i choose for myself. it’s why i keep starting to paint and then stopping. i must be a master or nothing at all. i’m a writer. who am i if i can’t even do that believably?
ayan artan • your perfectionism will not save you.
When you believe the work before you is the single piece that will forever define you, it’s difficult to let it go. The urge for perfection is overwhelming. It’s too much. We are frozen, and sometimes end up convincing ourselves that discarding the entire work is the only way to move forward. The only art the world gets to enjoy is from creators wh
... See moreCeline Nguyen • Everything I Read in February 2025
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Mattering grants everyone dignity, even as it brings with it a certain humility. In the course of a day, we all pivot between contexts in which we matter quite a bit (nursing the baby) and ones in which we hardly matter at all (just another commuter on a crowded subway car). This can produce a sense of whiplash, but we might think of that feeling a... See more
The Pain of Perfectionism
Unsure if this is true or not; but lately I haven’t felt the need to perform as well as I used to (at least not as extremely and wholly as I used to -8th grade) and maybe that’s because I’ve found people that I believe I matter to. I matter to my friends, and I have a decent amount of them, even more so who matter to me, which helps reinforce the notion that if i were to stop being perfect, as the essay says, the sky won’t fall since I will, and won’t, matter regardless.
believing that you can achieve perfection as an actor feels vain...thinking that you are capable of creating something completely unique and original performance wise just doesn't feel attainable.
the more i thought about it, the more i understood what he meant. there is ego there, in holding onto this belief that you are even capable of creating s... See more
the more i thought about it, the more i understood what he meant. there is ego there, in holding onto this belief that you are even capable of creating s... See more
ayan artan • your perfectionism will not save you.
if we believe that the worst version of ourselves is the true one, we’re protected from being ambushed by our own inadequacy. Better to overestimate our flaws than to fail to see them in the first place.
The Pain of Perfectionism
Adam Phillips’ - soliloquy analogy
An 1843 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birth-Mark,” reads like a fable about such violence. A “man of science” named Aylmer is so determined to remove his wife’s only imperfection, a hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek, that he ends up killing her. (The story offers a dark inversion of the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor so dis... See more
The Pain of Perfectionism
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