You're not a perfectionist. You're just lazy...

In the summer of 1505, a 21-year-old law student named Martin Luther got caught in a thunderstorm so violent that he thought he was gonna die. And in a panic, he screamed out a vow to God, spare me and I will become a monk. Martin Luther did survive, and two weeks later, to his father's complete and utter disapproval, he dropped out of law school and walked into an Augustinian monastery. Now, becoming a monk in the 16th century was not like signing up for a bougie meditation retreat today. It was an entire life of silence, poverty, prayer eight times a day, and complete and total obedience. But Martin Luther didn't just follow the rules. He fucking obliterated them. He fasted for days. He slept through freezing winter nights without a blanket. He whipped himself. Actual self- flagellation as penance for his sins. He confessed up to six hours at a time, dissecting every thought. His confessor literally refused to see him anymore because he was too much. The other monks would confess that they stayed up past lights out or coveted somebody else's potato salad. But this guy, this guy, Luther, he was in there for half the day, cataloging sins so microscopic that they barely qualified his thoughts. Eventually, a supervisor, Johann von Stoppitz, pulled him aside and told him, look, we have to have a bro talk. He said, true repentance, my friend, is not self-imposed punishment. It's a change of heart. But Martin Luther did not listen. And he later said, if anyone could have earned heaven by the life of a monk, it was me. He confessed to hating God because no matter how much he suffered, it was never enough to feel worthy. His breakthrough, the insight that would literally split the Christian church in half and reshape Western civilization, it only came when he finally stopped. When he finally accepted that he could not make himself perfect, and that no amount of self-inflicted pain would close the gap between who he was and who he thought he should be. That's when his mind finally opened up, and that's when his real work began. And he's not the only one. If you've ever felt like a perfectionist, if you've ever worn perfectionism like a badge of honor and told yourself that your relentless self-criticism is what makes you so good at what you do, you might be full of shit just without the whip. In this video, I want to break down why perfectionism is secretly a form of laziness, why being hard on yourself is a low-key addiction. And like all addictions, it keeps you stuck until you're able to replace it with something that actually helps you produce great work. All right. You know how this works. You start a project, you work on it for a few weeks, maybe a few months, but you never really show it to anybody because it's not ready yet. And by ready, we mean it's not perfect. And then you reach a point where you realize it will never live up to what you had imagined. And then you get really upset and then you lay awake at night and then you cry yourself to sleep and then you get angry and eat a whole tub of ice cream and then you abandon it and give up. And not only that, then you beat yourself up for abandoning it for weeks. for months, for years. So your life becomes this steady cycle of starting, agonizing, quitting, and then self-punishment without a single result to show for it. The perfectionism that's supposed to make you great is the very thing keeping you from doing anything at all. Now, think about what's actually happening when you beat yourself up after a failure like this. You feel terrible. You ruminate, you replay the mistake over and over in your head. You tell yourself you should have done better. It wasn't good enough. You should have known better. You're going to do better next time. And that process, that agonizing self-critical spiral, it feels productive. It feels like accountability. It feels like you're taking the failure seriously, like you're improving, like you're learning, but you're not doing a fucking thing. You're being lazy. You're not fixing any problem. You're not taking any action. You're not shipping any work. You're just suffering. And that suffering becomes a kind of emotional currency. Like you've paid for your failure by feeling bad about it. And once you've paid enough with bad feelings, then, well, you don't have to change anything because you already paid for it. It's basically penance over progress. It's self-flagellation instead of self-congratulation. You like that one? Yeah. That was a good one. This is literally what Martin Luther was doing in that monastery. He thought that if he suffered enough, if he whipped himself enough times and confessed enough sins and denied himself enough comfort, then eventually he would feel worthy. That the pain itself was the path. But all the pain did was keep him locked in a cycle where nothing ever changed and nothing moved forward. So here's what the research actually shows. It shows that self-forgiveness... not self-criticism, is what reduces the likelihood of repeating bad behaviors. A study from Carleton University found that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on an exam were significantly less likely to procrastinate on the next one. But the students who beat themselves up, who punish themselves, they procrastinated just as much, if not more, the second time around. This is counterintuitive, but it makes perfectionists deeply uncomfortable to hear this. Because the idea that being easier on yourself might make you more productive It feels like cheating. It feels like you're robbing somebody. Like, no, success isn't supposed to feel easy. I'm not supposed to feel good about this. It's supposed to be hard. I'm supposed to suffer. Hustle bros use all these metaphors like you're climbing a mountain or you're eating glass or you're like crawling through fucking barbed wire. What if none of this is true? What if just lowering your standards actually results in more productivity? What if dropping the bar lower is actually more optimal? I think it is, and I think this works because it breaks that penance cycle. When you stop paying for failure with punishment, then you're forced to pay with actual behavioral change. You suffer, you feel like you paid, and then you get to stay exactly the same. This is why being hard on yourself is actually terrible productivity advice. Not because you're suffering, you are, but because suffering is the only thing you're doing. This video is brought to you by Brain.fm. So while I was sitting down to work on this script, something came up and I wanted to share it with you. I caught myself doing the thing that I'm literally telling you not to do in this video. I was beating myself up for not having started earlier, calling myself lazy, running the whole internal monologue. And then I realized that monologue is actually the thing that stops me from getting to work, which is kind of the whole problem of most focus advice. It tells you to try harder, but trying harder is usually what gets in your way. And this is why I use Brain.fm. It's not just a playlist. It's functional music built on neuroscience designed to get your brain into a focused state in about 15 minutes. So there's no hype. There's no self-talk. There's no gearing up. You just hit play and your brain will kind of naturally go where you need it to go. I use it for any session where I need to stop thinking about thinking and actually just do the thing. It's backed by a PhD-led research team, peer-reviewed studies, and something like two decades of work on how sound can shape your attention. And honestly, it's the only audio tool that I've ever found that holds up when I'm actually trying to get shit done. You shouldn't have to psych yourself up into your own work. Focus should be a tool that you reach for, not a performance you have to put on. For a limited time, BrainFM is giving my viewers 30 days of unlimited access. There's no catch. You can try it for 30 days and cancel if you want. So head over to brain.fm slash IDGAF. That's brain.fm slash IDGAF. You can also check out the link in the description below. So stop being hard on yourself and just go get some work done. Stanley Kubrick is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. 2001, Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining. His work is studied all over the world and... Pretty much every major director working today will cite him as one of their most important influences. But he was also, by virtually every account, a fucking nightmare to work with. Kubrick was famous for demanding dozens, sometimes over a hundred, takes of a single scene. Not because he had a clear vision of what he wanted and needed to get it right, but by his own admission, he often didn't know what he wanted. He only knew what he didn't want. So he'd shoot and shoot and shoot. scene after scene after scene, waiting for something to emerge that met a standard he couldn't articulate, but would recognize once he saw it. Now imagine, imagine working under those conditions. Imagine shooting this YouTube video a hundred times. How fucking awful would our lives be? It would suck. Yes. Imagine working under these conditions. Apparently when they were shooting Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise got a stomach ulcer from the stress of working with Kubrick. But even worse was Shelley Duvall during The Shining. Kubrick put Duvall through what can only be described as psychological warfare. And I put warfare there just because abuse might get me sued. She did 127 takes of the baseball bat scene. 127. Kubrick instructed the entire crew not to show Duvall any sympathy while they were shooting. He told them to ignore her completely. He never once complimented her performance while openly praising Jack Nicholson right next to her. Duvall started losing her hair from the amount of stress that she was under. She was described as being in and out of hell throughout the shoot. The child actor, Danny Lloyd, required psychological counseling. The shoot was so stressful. The funny thing is, is that Kubrick rejected the label of perfectionist. He hated it. He didn't think he was being unreasonable. He genuinely believed he was serving the work, and that his refusal to accept anything less than whatever undefined vision lived in his head was what separated great art from mediocrity. And in a certain narrow sense, I mean, I don't know, maybe he was right? His films are masterpieces, but the human cost of his standards... was absolutely enormous. And there's a strong argument that Duvall would have been just as brilliant in 20 takes as she was in 127 of them. This is what psychologists call other oriented perfectionism. It's when you impose your own impossibly high standards, not just on yourself, but on everybody around you. And unlike the self oriented perfectionist like Martin Luther, who at least has the decency to suffer in private. the other oriented perfectionist exports their suffering onto others. And instead of admitting that their impossible standards are the problem, they decide everyone else is the problem. Now you probably know a person like this. Maybe it's the boss who only tells you what you did wrong, never what you did right. Maybe it's the partner who interrogates your past because they need to verify that you measure up to their standards. Maybe you're Asian and you have a mother. These people... think that they're helping. They frame their impossible standards as love, as commitment, as I just want the best for you. And that framing makes their behavior almost impossible to challenge because who's going to argue against wanting the best for someone? But what they're actually doing is making intimacy almost impossible. You can't be close to someone who's constantly measuring you against an ideal that you will never reach. You can't trust someone who treats your imperfections as problems to be solved rather than parts of you to be accepted. The other oriented perfectionist standards don't elevate the people around them. They suffocate them. And this other oriented perfectionism. like self-oriented perfectionism, is also fucking lazy. Yes, in a sense, I am calling Stanley Kubrick lazy. Because instead of doing the difficult work of understanding the needs and desires of others, learning how to find common ground and compromise, you simply bulldoze other people's perspectives with your own. Other-oriented perfectionism is strictly authoritarian in that there is never room for compromise. What's worse is that this form of perfectionism has been on the rise. A meta-analysis by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill at the University of Bath covering 41,000 college students across the US, Canada, and UK found that other-oriented perfectionism has increased by 36%. So we're not just getting harder on ourselves, we're also being harder on each other, which, if you've been on Twitter at all in the last 15 years, will not surprise you. I wanna wrap up with a story that I fucking love. So in 1935, World War II was clearly on the horizon and the British government asked a number of physicists and engineers to develop some way to detect bombers coming across the English Channel. And there was one physicist named Robert Watson Watt, who happened to figure out that radio waves could be used to detect incoming aircraft. The technology of radar did not exist at the time and the threat was existential. So time was running out. The funny thing about Watson Watt, though, was that he had this interesting philosophy that he called the cult of imperfection. And it went like this. He said, you should always go with the third best option. The first best option doesn't actually exist. And the second best option takes too long to get to. The psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this difference between people who chase the first best option and people who chase the third best option, maximizers and satisficers. A maximizer is someone who needs to explore every possible option before making a decision. They need everything to be perfect. They're the person who spends three hours reading mattress reviews, buys the mattress, then keeps reading mattress reviews because what if they got the wrong one? But a satisficer is just someone who lays down in the mattress store and waits until they fall asleep. Now here's what's wild. You would think that the maximizer, the person who does all the extra research that agonizes over every detail, that they would actually end up with better outcomes in life. That they would do better work, they would achieve more success, they would have better results. It turns out they don't. Schwartz found that not only do maximizers often have worse outcomes, but they are consistently less happy with their outcomes even when they do make a better choice. Read that again. Oh, I'm not reading. Okay. In other words, Even if the Maximizer does get a better mattress, they still feel worse about it. Because the Maximizer's brain never stops comparing, it's never done shopping. There's always another option they didn't consider. There's another review that they didn't read. There's another version of reality that they chose differently, and everything was perfect in that reality. Why didn't they choose that one? Sound familiar? But here's the tricky thing. A Maximizer on the surface looks like they're pursuing excellence, but they're not. Really what they're pursuing? is a lack of regret, which spoiler alert, that's not really something you can completely eliminate. It comes with being a person. Satisficers, on the other hand, are not settling. That's a misconception that a lot of people have. Oh, you're just lowering your standards. You're settling. No, what a satisficer is doing is that they're looking for the exact threshold that is good enough. They just need what works. They don't need the best because they understand that the best. takes too long. And because they're not trapped in an infinite comparison loop, they actually get shit done and then feel good about it. Watson Watt understood this instinctively. He was a satisficer. His radar system was clunky. It was imprecise. It had significant limitations, but it was also deployed in time. Like they actually used it to prevent the Luftwaffe from bombing in the Battle of Britain. They gave the RAF enough warning to scramble fighters and defend the country. Imperfect radar helped win the war. Perfect radar wouldn't arrive for another 10 years. Jeff Bezos has a great version of this as well. He once told Amazon shareholders that he believes optimal decisions happen when you have 70% of the information you need. Less than 70%, you'll probably make a bad call. More than 70%, and you're probably wasting time gathering data that... It's not going to change the outcome. And this is the secret advantage that satisficers have that maximizers don't realize. By shipping at 70%, you gain way more information about what works and what doesn't so that you can iterate and try again. But maximizers, because they never try the first time, they never get that information back. And so they end up falling behind. Now, obviously, this applies to a lot more than business decisions. In writing, I'll hand a draft to an editor when it's probably around 70, 80% of where I want it. Not because I don't care, but because I know that the last 20% is going to be better addressed with real feedback from another person than just a month of me sitting alone in a room. The perfectionist hears this and panics. But what if the 70% version is embarrassing? What if people judge me? What if it's not good enough? But that panic is the tell because the fear isn't really about the quality. It's about the vulnerability. Shipping something imperfect means exposing yourself to the possibility that it's not good enough and by extension that you're not good enough. So you keep polishing, tweaking and delaying not because the work needs it, but because you do. You need the illusion that if you just work a little harder, suffer a little more, hold yourself to a slightly higher standard, you can eliminate the risk of being seen as imperfect. But you can't. That risk is always going to be there. So how do you become more of a satisficer? Well, what researchers have found is that you decide the criteria before you start the task. You don't do it during, you don't do it after, you do it before. You write down what good enough looks like when you're calm and rational about it, and then you commit to it. Now the perfectionist resists this because defining good enough in advance just feels like giving up. It feels like a cop out, but it's actually the opposite. It's the only way to free yourself from the prison of infinite comparison. It's how you escape the monastery. Now the ultimate solution to perfectionism isn't necessarily getting rid of it. It's just reorienting your understanding of what perfect actually means. That beautiful vision in your head, the one where the project is flawless, the relationship is seamless, the body is ideal, the career is absolutely spotless. That's not perfection. That's a fantasy. And you know what confusing a fantasy with reality is? It's fucking lazy. It's a lack of mental awareness and mental effort. Real perfection is a process. It's the act of getting something out there, having it criticized. failing, and then improving upon it. It's what Watson Watt did with the radar. It's what Luther did with his theology. He stopped trying to be worthy and just started doing the work that actually mattered. So yes, strive for greatness, strive for quality, hell, strive for perfection if you feel like it. But understand that the path there runs through imperfection, through the 70% version of it, through the failure that teaches you something the fantasy never could. Because here's what 500 years of history keep telling us. From a freezing monastery in a Fert to the Battle of Britain, suffering is not the same thing as progress. Punishment is not the same thing as discipline. And being hard on yourself is not the same thing as being good to yourself. In fact, it's usually just the opposite.

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Many people call themselves a perfectionist like it's a personality trait worth bragging about. But perfectionism isn't anything to be proud of, in fact, it's just another form of avoidance. 

In this video, I break down why being hard on yourself is the laziest thing you can do and what you should do instead if you want to actually do great things in your life. 

Written & Directed by Mark Manson
Edited by Michelle Hsieh
Director of Photography Jess Choi
Thumbnail by Jonathan Sippel