Jay Matthews

Pathological Perfectionism has been very damaging, and as a result there has been a movement towards increasing acceptance of self and circumstance. Dr. Gena Gorlin argues that this is good, but it is only the first step. She presents a mindset and proposal for how we can pursue excellence in healthier ways—as builders.

Anonymous work should be both collective and very personal. Everyone should do what they want, as naturally as breathing. But they should have no ulterior motive and wish to sign their breath.

"When you make that shift internally, what happens is, you release the ego from having to cling to that belief, right? Models should prove things. And models also need to be tested, right? Because you always want to see if you're right or not." — Jim

This, indeed, is the silent refrain of the novel: the haunting reminder that however the past and the future might unfold and refold in the origami of even the most elaborate time-model, unless we live in the present, we are not living at all.

We must also include in our clinical theories the psychological misery occasioned by actual and often ongoing experiences of social oppression. In part, such socialized misery may be internalized and perpetuated by an individual’s use of mechanisms such as identification with the aggressor, dissociation, denial, and projective identification, which... See more

As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

Buried beneath the surface ambitions of millions of office and knowledge workers around the world are dreams of working on things that are more challenging. This is the inspiration deficit. Almost any path that can be mapped and planned in today’s world has likely been sucked dry of the challenge that people desire.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling.