- Thanks to Notion for
sponsoring this video and supporting my channel. When most people think of Steve Jobs, they naturally think of Apple. But, there's a story about Jobs that's always stuck in my head and it has nothing to do with Apple. Well, almost nothing. In 1985 Jobs was forced out of Apple after a long power
struggle with John Sculley who was the CEO at the time. In response, Jobs left Apple and took a handful of
the employees with him to start a brand new company which would develop what was
called the NeXT Computer. This was gonna be a much more powerful, workstation style computer
meant for colleges and it was housed in this
black cube shaped case. And in Walter Isaacson's
biography of Jobs, he recounts how Jobs insisted the black paint that covered
the outside of this case also be applied to the
inside at extra cost even though almost no
customer would ever open it up and see the paint for themselves. And this story illustrates one of Job's most famous
qualities, his perfectionism. Jobs demanded absolute
perfection of all the hardware and software that he
and his teams developed. And it's one of the reasons why he was notoriously hard to work for. It's one of the reasons that pushed him to be so cruel to his employees at times. And yet the legacy left behind by Jobs and by other famous perfectionists often makes perfectionism seem like something worth striving for. Some people even wear
it as a badge of pride. That's why, "I'm a perfectionist," is one of the classic cop-out answers to that age old interview question, "Tell me your greatest weaknesses." Along with really brilliant ones. Like, "I just work too hard, man," or, "I care too much," or the classic, "I have no weaknesses." But, as you're gonna find out
in the rest of this video, perfectionism really is a weakness. Sure, it can have its
benefits and the stories from people like Jobs can
make it seem like a strength, but overall, the drawbacks really do outweigh those benefits. In 2018 a research review surveyed all of the perfectionism research that had been done over the past decades. And they found that while perfectionism was aligned with being
more motivated at work and putting in more hours, it was also aligned with stress,
with burnout, with anxiety with overworking and with depression and to add some anecdotal
evidence to that research review, I have been a perfectionist
for a very long time and I found some additional drawbacks, often focus way too intently
on a small part of a project that ultimately doesn't really
matter at the end of the day and it will 'cause me
to waste a lot of time. Earlier this year, I made a video called, How To Think More Strategically. And if you saw it, you'll know that we did a lot of chess B-roll in that video. And I had one shot in particular that I really wanted to get. I had envisioned having
the camera suspended over a chess board, slowly moving back as different chess positions
sort of flashed by. So, essentially, I had to play out a game of chess on the board and I could have gotten
the shot a lot quicker just by randomly moving the pieces, taking one away every once in a while, and then, you know, taking some stills from that sequence and
creating out of that. But in my mind, the only way to do that sequence properly was to play an actual
game on the chess board. - [Woman] So here Tom is
playing against himself. - So that way, when saw those chess pieces moving in the shot, they would
be moving in real positions that actually made sense. And no one has ever commented on that. I doubt anybody has ever noticed that they were moving in a realistic way and that took me way
longer than it should have, but I just couldn't let it go. And in addition to just
wasting time on things that I really don't
need to be fixating on, I'll sometimes be paralyzed
and unable to start until I get right up against
the deadline for a project. I'll get ideas, I'll start
writing something down and then my brain goes,
"That's not good enough, your audience has better
expectations than that of you, that's not gonna fly." So, personally, I would
like it if perfectionism had a little bit less
influence in my life. And if you identify as
a perfectionist as well you might want the same things. So, I wanna talk about some ways to get over this perfectionism or start moving past it in this video. And to do that, I think
it's important to tell you what a perfectionist really is, because it isn't just somebody who has high standards for themselves. As a psychologist, David
Burns describes it, "A perfectionist is a
person whose standards are high beyond reach or reason and who strains compulsively
and unremittingly towards impossible goals." And, this part's very important, "Measures their own worth entirely in terms of productivity
and accomplishment." Having high standards for
yourself is a great thing but perfectionists tend
to take it a bit too far. They set the bar impossibly high and then they tie their self-worth to it. Now, classically,
perfectionism has been divided into two camps, adaptive and
maladaptive perfectionism. These have also been called
excellence seeking perfectionism and failure avoiding perfectionism. The excellence seeking perfectionist are the people with ultra-high
standards for their work. They're constantly
trying to make their work as good as it can be and they apply their perfectionism to people working under them and sometimes even their significant
others and friends as well. Meanwhile, the failure
avoiding perfectionist are the people who are more
fixated on not failing. They're worried that other people don't think their work is good enough and by extension, that they
aren't good enough either. And this can be split up even further. In 1991, a pair of Canadian psychologists developed their own model
with three different types. Self-oriented perfectionism, where you have your own
ultra-high standards for yourself, other-oriented perfectionism, where you have unrealistic
standards for other people and then socially-prescribed
perfectionism, where, again, you feel
like other people have super high standards for you and that you can't live up to them. And when I look at my own perfectionism I can see that it doesn't neatly fall into any one of these categories. Yes, I have my own high
standards for my own work, I want to see things be
as good as they can be but I also feel like
the people that I know both in the real world,
my personal relationships but also my audience online has super high expectations
for me and for my work. And that creates a lot of pressure which can lead to that paralysis and that fixation of the
things that don't really matter at the end of the day. And while we're talking about these different
types of perfectionism, I will note that, that research review found that the big
drawbacks of perfectionism, the depression, the anxiety,
the stress, the burnout, these were more aligned with the failure avoidance
type of perfectionism. But, they were also aligned
with the excellence seeking type if to a lesser degree,
they still were there. And crucially, they also found that neither type of perfectionism was aligned with better
overall work performance. So, even though we may have people like Jobs as the storied counterexample, the broader research has shown
that being a perfectionist doesn't make you better at your job. So, the question now is,
what can we do about this? If we are perfectionists, how can we move past it
and let perfectionism be less of an influence in
our life and on our work? Well, the first thing
is to work on setting more realistic expectations for yourself. As the author, Martin
Anthony, writes in his book, "When Perfect Isn't Good Enough." "Although standards and
beliefs are subjective, people usually take for granted
that their interpretations, their beliefs, their predictions
and standards are true. So becoming less
perfectionistic will involve relaxing your standards and changing your perfectionistic beliefs. It'll involve treating your standards and beliefs as possibilities or guesses about the way the world should be, rather than as hard facts." And if you, like me, have that socially
prescribed perfectionism I think the best way to start doing this is to talk to people, ask them, "What do you really expect of me?" Because I can not tell you how many times I've had conversations with
people that I work with or with people in my audience and find out that what they expect
from me is still high but not to that astronomical level that I've built up in my head. Next, if you're gonna perfect something, then perfect how you
allocate your efforts. In other words, get to
know the 80/20 rule. This rule states that 80% of the results often come from just 20% of
the efforts, the vital few. And we as perfectionists are
often pretty bad identifying those vital few things,
both as individuals but also sometimes as
entire organizations. As I was researching this video, my editor Tony gave me a great story from the book, "Creativity, Inc." Which is written by Ed Catmull,
the co-founder of Pixar, where he writes, "There is a phenomenon that producers a Pixar call,
'The beautifully shaded penny.' It refers to the fact that the artists who work on our films care
so much about every detail that they will sometimes
spend days or weeks crafting the equivalent
of a penny on a nightstand that you'll never see." There is a great example
of this in Monster Inc, for Mike and Sulley bring Boo back to their apartment for the first time. There's this three second shot of a stack of CDs that Boo knocks over. And even though it's
only three seconds long, and even though you only
see a few of the CD covers, the artists at Pixar took the time to create art for every
single one of those CDs, there are more than 90 of them. In telling that story, Catmull
was mainly making a point about the production
process of the company, writing that, "Because of
the way production unfolded our people had to work on scenes without knowing the context for them, so they just overbuilt them to be safe." But, there's another insight here as well. He goes on to write that,
"To make things worse, our standards of excellent
are extremely high leading them to conclude
that more is always more." This is something that
perfectionist really deal with. And the truth is often the opposite. Often less is more, taking away is more. So get critical about your work. Try to identify that
crucial 20%, that vital few and spend a little bit less
time fixating on the 80% that doesn't matter. Finally, be imperfect on purpose. One of the most common
ways to get over a fear is called exposure therapy. Essentially, you expose
yourself to the thing you fear over and over and over again at slightly increasing levels of intensity until eventually, you're
just kind of over it. And to apply this principle
of exposure therapy to this problem, you need
to be imperfect on purpose. One of my favorite
examples of this in action comes from the YouTuber, Andrew Huang, who makes a ton of music. And I cannot, for the life of me, find the video where he said this, but I saw a video where he said that he'll often limit
himself to four takes when recording parts for a song. So if there's a specific
guitar lick he's gotta record, he does four takes, takes
the best one and that's it. And fittingly, Andrew has published hundreds of songs on his Spotify and meanwhile, I've published three. So, there's a thing or two
that I could learn from Andrew. Quantity challenges
are also a great thing. Jennifer Dewalt made 180
small websites in 180 days and learned a ton doing it. My friend Martin, who helped me write the
script for this video and who is even worse at
perfectionism than I am, by his own admission, said that he did a daily
Instagram challenge where he posted daily
photos for over 200 days as a way to be imperfect on purpose. And as a side note, he told me that he recently
constructed a portfolio of his best photography work. There are 24 photos there and he found out that 15
of the photos he picked came from that daily challenge. So, even though he didn't
have a whole lot of time to make perfect work, he ended up with work he was proud of. And there's a reason for this. Not only do these deadlines give you very little time to fixate and act on perfectionist tendencies but they also give you a ton of feedback. You're making and publishing things and getting feedback on them and coming back and reviewing them and this helps you get better. Perfectionists don't
get a ton of feedback. That research review I mentioned at the beginning of the video
concluded that perfectionists don't do any better at work
than non-perfectionists but they didn't know why. And I think this is the reason, perfectionists don't get as many at-bats. They don't get that feedback
that is crucial to growth. So, be imperfect on purpose. Not only are you gonna get that feedback but each time that you
act in an imperfect way you're going to prove to your brain that imperfection is not the disaster that I thought it would be. Imperfect chair turn. Oh, hey there, other camera angle. So I'd like to wrap this video up by giving you a quick look at
how we made it, using Notion. So at first there is the idea stage. Martin came up with the idea
for this particular video. So he added this cool content
ideas area that we built which can be separated by our channels, or, if you switch the view, by topic. Once we knew that we
were gonna make the video we use the template to create
the video project area. Martin and I both added a ton of research and outlines to our research
area, pasted tons of links and then I did a bunch of writing and turned that all into a
script in the script area. Now, while filming, I pulled
up that script on my iPad which sits on a music stand next to me so I can look at the lines and then to say them into the camera. Then, once I've done the initial cuts and know roughly how long
the video is gonna be, I add all my B-roll ideas
to a tool called Frame.io, which gives each one of them a timestamp. I then export those and bring them into this pre-made database
in my video project. And, because I have the timestamps I can sort them all chronologically. But, I can also tag them, film,
overhead, screen recording, whatever it is and switch my view so I can more efficiently
batch them as I gather them. Once the video is done, I
create an editing checklist from a template that reminds
me to do all the little things like bordering captions
and adding in cards. And finally, I had the
URL back in the Notion and I marked the video, published, so that it shows up in this
special archive view we built. So that is idea generation that is research, scripting,
project planning, to do lists and an archive all in one tool. And we're able to do this because Notion isn't just a note taking
tool or to do list app. It's really a set of building blocks that allows you to create
the exact tools you need for the work that you want to do. It can be as simple as you want or as complex as you need it to be. And now is a great time to try Notion out using the link below because their personal plan
is now completely free. So check out that link below
if you want to get started. And after that, check out my new channel, Thomas Frank Explains, for some tutorials and even some free templates that can help you get up
and running more quickly. Thanks as always for watching this video, hopefully you found it helpful, hopeful you liked it. This is the last one for 2020. So if you did like it, hit that like button as always to show the YouTube algorithm
what's up and get subscribed. If you haven't already, you'll have a subscribe
button somewhere on screen along with the other couple
videos you can check out. And, once again, I'll have that Thomas Frank Explains
channel linked here as well, so you can check that
out if you are interested in upgrading your Notion
knowledge and workspace. See you in the next one.
