“Perfection is the enemy.”
This simple phrase became a mantra of sorts for our cohort in graduate school. The group included students who wanted to stand out in the best way, especially during the first year. We’d compare notes and check each other’s progress in a quest for the perfect submission. After several semesters, we recognized (at last) that the perfect submission was elusive. Never-ending revisions gave way to doing our best possible (but not necessarily perfect) work, making necessary refinements, and meeting deadlines.
Excellence vs. Perfectionism
To be sure, compromise can be a problem. We all want the surgeon who graduated at the top of her class; however, excellence and perfection are not necessarily the same. A student who earns an excellent grade may learn from feedback and recognize an opportunity for improvement, while a student seeking perfection may obsess over two points they “missed” on a 98% grade. A student pursuing excellence looks for opportunities to grow. A student seeking perfection wants guarantees of success.
But a guarantee of success doesn’t contribute to vocational exploration and discernment. Often, we learn from looking back on our experiences and determining what worked well and what didn’t. The perfect path to perfect results doesn’t allow students to try or even be made aware of new things that might be a better fit for them. As a colleague shared recently, some students don’t feel that they’ve been allowed to fail.
Research suggests that this pursuit of perfection has increased in recent decades. According to Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, young people not only feel that they’re being held to difficult standards, they also project this expectation onto others. As they write, “levels of self-oriented perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, and other-oriented perfectionism have linearly increased” since the 1980s. Their analysis also describes a correlation between perfectionism and anxiety and depression.
Students are encouraged to compete long before they reach the college campus. Their high school experience is quantified in grade point averages, class rankings, and (often) numerous extracurricular activities. For some, an A is not exceptional, it’s normal and required. As one student confided to me, “I don’t do Bs.”
Trying to be perfect does more than increase stress; it limits vocational exploration by discouraging risk, and growth requires risk. Students who are unwilling to try something new are likely to miss out on growth opportunities, and failure reveals important gaps. When we don’t succeed at something right away, we can analyze our process and figure out how to improve. This process might even reveal a need for a different path altogether. The traditional college years provide time and space to pivot to better choices. Anyone who has changed careers after college knows that there’s much less freedom to change when a family depends on your income.
Vocational Mapping
Rather than a straight line, vocational exploration and discernment often include a winding path through both successes and disappointments. In 2022, I participated in the NetVUE Teaching Vocational Exploration seminar, and the the facilitators invited us to use a mapping exercise to illustrate our vocational journeys, each person creating a poster displaying milestones in their life. The visuals included wonderful things (diplomas, children, achievements) and difficult things (failures, disappointments, deaths). In “The Myth of the Linear Career,” David Youland describes this winding path and its value:
“While linear career paths might initially look appealing, they fail to reflect reality for most of us. Modern careers are rarely linear and typically do not reflect deep discernment. While popular culture usually portrays career trajectories as a straightforward climb from entry-level positions to senior leadership roles, real-life experiences are frequently quite different.”
Some of my colleagues have begun opening up to students about their own winding paths, sharing their personal stories to demonstrate that career trajectories are often complicated and unpredictable. Sharing our vocational exploration and discernment stories with students not only models the benefits of self-reflection, but also the value in our detours and setbacks.
Self-Optimization and Maxxing
The pressure students are under isn’t limited to academic performance. They may also feel pressure to seek perfection in other things. Social media influencers (many of whom are selling solutions) encourage followers to “self-optimize” their lives, including their nutrition (protein maxxing), their rest (sleepmaxxing), and even their appearance (looksmaxxing). Most students won’t practice the extreme behavior some of these trends encourage, but the pressure to maximize and perfect themselves can lead to anxiety, obsession, and other problems. (On a positive note, “maxxing” has been applied to so many terms that some are using it ironically now to highlight the absurdity of this extreme behavior.)
Self-improvement isn’t new, but the pressure to optimize oneself is more constant as students interact with media messages each day. Social media algorithms push images of washboard abs, perfect poses, and tropical vacations because they generate interest. They also drive sales and interactions. There is money to be made from making us feel imperfect.
The beauty industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising in the United States alone each year to show us how we could look and it brings in billions from consumers. Of course, advertising isn’t always bad; however, exposure to idealized, unrealistic images can lead to negative psychological outcomes such as body dissatisfaction and negative self-perception. Rather than embracing what makes us different, we feel defeated when we don’t conform to narrow standards and perfect ourselves in these ways.
Promising Practices for Faculty
Faculty members have little power to reverse these social trends; however, we can manage our classrooms in ways that help students navigate them. For example, we may share with students about a failure we experienced. How did we fail? What did it teach us?
A sense of community is also important; as students develop personal connections in our spaces, they’ll see that imperfection is an important part of being human. To that end, we may include lessons about perfection and failure related to our disciplines. One of my favorite assignments focuses on resilience; students work in groups to study historic figures who recovered and thrived after experiencing a substantial shortcoming or failure. Students examine the problem, articulate what we can learn from it, and present their findings to their colleagues. Almost every semester, students focus on actor Robert Downey, Jr. for this assignment. Before he was cast as Iron Man, Downey was an addict and an inmate, sentenced to prison for drug charges. After his release, he completed a court-ordered drug-treatment program and eventually repaired his reputation. My hope is that students learn, as Downey’s example suggests, that redemption is possible (if not easy) after setbacks.
Finally, we can give students room to admit that they have failed at something. Some are likely to feel that if they open up about disappointment, they’ll be disqualified from success in the classroom. Creating a culture that acknowledges trial and error can reduce anxiety and lead to positive results.
In Bird by Bird: Suggestions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott suggests that there’s freedom in letting go of perfection. As she writes,
“I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
Failure is part of human experience. We can’t be good at everything all the time. Allowing our students the opportunity to try, learn, fail, and grow prepares them to live vocationally and to flourish after they graduate.
Brian Bowman is an assistant professor of communication studies at Campbell University and a NetVUE Faculty Fellow and consultant. He co-facilitates a faculty cohort at Campbell that explores questions of vocation and calling. His areas of academic interest include media messages and media literacy. He was a member of the 2022 cohort of NetVUE’s Teaching Vocation Exploration seminar. For more posts by Brian, visit his author page on this blog.