Procrastination allows people to take comfort in believing that their ability is greater than their performance indicates, perhaps even maintaining the belief that they are brilliant or unlimited in their potential to do well. As long as you procrastinate, you never have to confront the real limits of your ability, whatever those limits are.
Some people would rather suffer the consequences of procrastination than the humiliation of trying and not doing as well as they had hoped. It is more tolerable to blame themselves for being disorganized, lazy, or uncooperative than to view themselves as being inadequate and unworthy—the failure they fear so deeply. And it is the fear of this failure that is eased by procrastination.
People who worry about being judged inadequate or unworthy usually are afraid that is exactly what they are. If they take a realistic look at themselves and judge themselves to be lacking, they face another fear. They fear they are unlovable. As one procrastinator put it, “If I don’t do well, who would want me? Who could love me if I have nothing to offer?” Because this woman thinks that her ability, reflected by her performance on tasks, will determine whether or not she deserves to be loved, the consequences of not measuring up are much greater than simply “failing” in terms of her performance—it means failing as a person and being unwanted by all.
The World of a Perfectionist
Often without realizing it, people who procrastinate are perfectionists. In an attempt to prove they are good enough, they strive to do the impossible, thinking that they should have no problem at all reaching their lofty goals. They usually put unrealistic demands on themselves and then feel overwhelmed when they are unable to meet them. Discouraged, they retreat from the demands by procrastinating.
Most procrastinators don’t understand how they could possibly be considered perfectionists when everywhere they turn they find evidence of how they have messed up. Gary, a self-employed Web site designer, sees himself this way: “I always do things in a half-baked way. I do a rushed job at the last minute and sometimes I don’t even see projects through to the end. How in the world can I be a perfectionist?”
Psychologists have identified two types of perfectionists, adaptive and maladaptive.1 If you are an adaptive perfectionist, you have high standards, and you believe your performance lives up to them. This kind of successful perfectionism feels like an essential part of your identity and is a basis for self-esteem.2 However, if you are a maladaptive perfectionist, you, too, have high standards, but you are disappointed in yourself. In maladaptive perfectionism, there is a discrepancy between your standards and the way you view your performance, so you are prone to be self-critical and are more vulnerable to feeling depressed and having low self-esteem.3
Maladaptive perfectionists are excessively concerned about making mistakes.4 As psychologist David Burns pointed out, people who are high achievers generally are not intractable perfectionists.5 The champion athlete, the extremely successful businessperson, and the Nobel Prize-winning scientist usually know there will be times when they will make mistakes or when they will have a bad day, and their performance will suffer a temporary setback. Although they strive for high goals, they are also able to tolerate the frustrations and disappointments of sometimes failing to meet those goals. They know that they can improve their efforts, and they work hard to do so.
In contrast, the perfectionistic procrastinator usually expects more of herself than is realistic. A woman who hasn’t exercised in years wants to be in top physical condition in two weeks. A first-time novelist wants the first draft of his writing to be of publishable quality. A college freshman who has not mastered time management or study skills expects to get all As his first semester. A young man wants every phone call to land a date; a salesman expects to turn every customer into a sale. As a result, the high standards that are intended to motivate people toward accomplishment often become impossible standards that hinder their efforts. An important question to ask yourself is: Are you setting standards for yourself that enable you to make progress, or do your standards lead you to become discouraged, frustrated, and stuck? It’s not how high your standards are that makes you a maladaptive perfectionist; it’s how far below your standards you perceive your performance to be, how unrealistic and inhibiting your standards are for you, and how harshly you judge yourself for not meeting them. When perfectionism becomes a problem, procrastination is likely to become a problem.6
There are several beliefs cherished by perfectionists who procrastinate. These beliefs may be operating even though you’re not aware of them, and they may even seem noble and reasonable. But they can make your life extremely unsatisfying and pave the way for procrastination rather than progress.
Mediocrity Breeds Contempt. For some procrastinators the thought of being ordinary can be so intolerable that they want everything they do to be outstanding. They wish not only for ideal careers and relationships but also to make a masterpiece of the letter they write or the garden they plant. If you expect your everyday performance to be up to the level of your ideal picture of yourself, then whatever you do is bound to seem mediocre in comparison. You devalue the average, the ordinary, the regular, regarding them with contempt. Since mistakes and flaws are an inevitable part of the human condition, people who can’t bear the ordinary find comfort in procrastination. When an ordinary performance can be attributed to the last-minute rush, they can continue to believe their ideal could have been reached, if they’d had more time. This allows perfectionists to avoid feeling contempt for themselves when they are simply average.
Excellence without Effort. The perfectionist believes that if one is truly outstanding, even difficult things should be easy. Creative ideas should flow ceaselessly! Studying should be pure intellectual joy! Decisions should be made immediately with total certainty! Using such impossible standards, a person who must work hard, or even exert a moderate amount of effort to get something done, is likely to feel inferior. A college physics major said, “If I can’t solve a problem instantly, I feel stupid. I understand the concepts and I’m pretty smart, so I should be able to see the answer right away—I get so mad at myself that I can’t stand sitting there. I play video games.”
The expectation that one should be able to catch on instantly, no matter how complex the material, brings many procrastinators to a grinding halt. Their disappointment at having to work hard prevents them from making the effort required to grapple with the material and master it. Instead, they avoid it by delaying. In the long run, their need to be smart keeps them ignorant. After all, if you can’t stand not knowing, you can’t learn.
Going It Alone. Perfectionists often feel they should do everything by themselves, believing it’s a sign of weakness to get help of any kind. There is no flexibility to consider what might be best for the situation, no room to admit that sometimes you don’t have the answer, that you can’t do it all by yourself, or that it just might be more fun to have company. Even when it would be more efficient to get help, many perfectionists are bound and determined to work, and suffer, in isolation. They may even take pride in this splendid isolation. Or they may come from a culture that does not endorse asking for help, where needing help is seen as a sign of weakness and a source of shame. When the burden finally becomes too heavy, procrastination becomes a source of relief. Unable to do everything all by themselves, they resort to delay.
There Is a Right Way. This is one of the most cherished notions held by perfectionists. They believe there is one correct solution to a problem, and it is their responsibility to find it. Until they’ve discovered the right solution, they are reluctant to take any course of action or commit themselves to anything. So, rather than take the risk of making the wrong choice, they do nothing.
Consider the case of Charles and Brenda who wanted to move from their small town to a larger community. They knew the decision would change the course of their lives forever, and they wanted to be absolutely sure they were doing the right thing. They made long lists of pros and cons for each
town they were considering. Since they could never feel absolutely certain that any one location would be the perfect place to live, work, and raise children, they never made the move. As long as Brenda and Charles put off deciding where to live, they can hold on to the illusion that there is a perfect solution and they can make a perfect choice.
Perfectionists fear that if they make a wrong decision, they will think less of themselves and their feeling of regret will be intolerable. But underneath this apprehension is a belief that they can (and should) be omniscient—able to read the future and guarantee how things will turn out. It is a childhood fantasy that grown-ups know everything (how did your parents figure out that you were lying anyway?) and most of us harbor the wish that someday we, too, will know and control everything. It is indeed hard to accept the reality that we are neither omniscient nor omnipotent—and neither were our parents.
I Can’t Stand to Lose. (Or: What, Me Competitive?) On the surface, it appears that many procrastinators are not competitive. Their constant delaying takes them out of the running, so they don’t really compete—or do they? Randy, a contractor who often delays submitting bids until it is too late, made a typical comment: “I’m not interested in competing for jobs. I’ll find a job without going through that conventional rigmarole—I like to run on my own track.” The truth is that many perfectionists hate losing so much that they avoid any activity that would bring them into direct competition with others. Like Randy’s refusal to play the game, an apparent disinterest in competition covers the feeling that competition is dangerous. Randy hates to lose because not winning means he has failed, and failing means he is worthless. He can’t lose because he never really enters the race.
Procrastination can be a form of “self-handicapping.”7 You make winning so much harder for yourself, like playing golf with only one hand, that you then have an excuse for your dismal score: “Hey, I was only playing with one hand!” People who “choose to lose” procrastinate to such an extent that they guarantee failure, yet they still imagine that they could have won if they had tried—like the bachelor who brags about all the hot romances he could have if only he had the time to make phone calls, or the student from another country who puts off mastering English, so that papers are graded down because of the quality of the language and not because of the quality of the ideas. Self-handicapping is a backhanded way to protect your ego and your self-esteem: I lost, but I did it to myself.
All or Nothing. The all-or-nothing view of life is common among perfectionists who procrastinate. A person who believes that he or she must do everything usually has difficulty appreciating any progress made toward a goal: as long as the project is incomplete, it seems that nothing at all has been accomplished. As one perfectionist put it, “It’s either gold or it’s garbage.” No wonder it’s so tempting to give up in despair before reaching the end!
The all-or-nothing notion can affect a person’s initial formulation of goals, leading him or her to attempt to do everything at once because anything less seems insufficient. For instance, we asked Steve to select a goal that he wanted to accomplish during a one-week period of time. Initially, he wanted to work out at his health club every day during the week. Although he had joined the club more than a year earlier, he had never once used his membership. It took some work, but we finally convinced Steve that the goal of going to the club every day was pretty unrealistic. Reluctantly, Steve modified his goal, deciding that he would be doing well if he went to the club three times during the week. A week later, Steve was very discouraged because he had used the gym only twice. Even though Steve worked out more in that week than he had during the entire previous year, he felt as if he’d accomplished nothing.
With an all-or-nothing attitude, you can become discouraged for many reasons, including:
You don’t accomplish everything you set out to do.
You don’t do things exactly as you had planned.
You do something well but not perfectly.
You don’t get as much recognition as you feel you deserve.
In situations like these, you can feel as though you accomplished nothing, because what you have done isn’t exactly what you envisioned. If you can only be satisfied with perfection, you are doomed to be disappointed. After all, going after perfection is like chasing the horizon: you keep going, but you can never really get there.
Perfection is an ideal that is relinquished very, very gradually. Even if you can agree intellectually that perfectionistic standards are unrealistic and counterproductive, you may still find it hard to accept the fact that you aren’t now, never have been, and never will be perfect.
For most perfectionists, accomplishment represents much more than simply achieving goals or being remarkable. In many of their families, being outstanding seemed to be the most reliable strategy for earning recognition, acceptance, and love—accomplishments were valued above all else, and being second best seemed of no value at all. Other perfectionists never enjoyed the satisfaction of winning approval. Although accomplishments were highly valued, their ability to achieve was doubted, criticized, or undermined. They may try to dispel doubts by striving to be perfect, believing that if they’re ever going to earn respect and love, perfection is their only hope.
Mindsets
Our observations about the perfectionism of procrastinators have been supported by the extensive research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. Her research on how people cope with failure led her to identify two different mindsets, the Fixed Mindset and the Growth Mindset.8 The perspective of a Fixed Mindset is that intelligence and talent are attributes you are born with; they are fixed and permanent. Success is all about proving your ability, validating that you are smart or talented. And it’s something you have to prove over and over again, as each new set of challenges enters your life. If you have a Fixed Mindset, there is no room for mistakes in any situation, because mistakes are evidence of failure that prove you’re not really smart or talented after all. If you were, you would not have to work at it—whatever “it” is; having to make an effort is evidence of deficiency. And because each performance is seen to be an eternal measure of your ability, failure feels dangerous; it defines you forever.
You can see how fear of failure springs from the Fixed Mindset and leads, in turn, to procrastination. When things get hard, people with a Fixed Mindset retreat and lose interest. They don’t want to do anything that might prove their inadequacy—or, we would add, their unworthiness. Procrastination protects people from taking a risk that might result in failure, which from a Fixed Mindset perspective would be a life sentence of inadequacy.
Contrast this with Dweck’s second mindset—the Growth Mindset. The central belief in this mindset is that abilities can be developed; with hard work and effort you can get smarter and better over time. In a Growth Mindset, effort is what makes you smart or good at something; it is what “ignites ability and turns it into accomplishment.” 9 From this perspective, you don’t have to be good at something immediately. In fact, it’s more interesting to do things you’re not good at, because that’s a way to stretch yourself and to learn. People with a Growth Mindset don’t just seek challenges; they thrive on them. Failures may hurt or disappoint, but they don’t define a person. In fact, failure becomes a reason to redouble effort and work harder, rather than to give up, retreat, and . . . procrastinate.
Adopting the Growth Mindset is one way to undo the self-worth equation. Not only does performance not reflect your value as a person, but performance is no longer a central concern! What matters is what you learn, what you feel excited about, and how you’ve improved, while outcome moves to the background. The definition of “ability” is no longer a fixed entity; it is something that can change and develop. There’s no longer anything to prove. As Dweck asks so compellingly, “Is success about learning—or proving you’re smart?”10
The writer May Sarton has described the Growth Mindset beautifully. “In the middle of the night, things well up from the past
that are not always cause for rejoicing—the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, painful or delightful, weave themselves into a rich tapestry, and all give me food for thought, food to grow on.”11
THE FATE OF THE IMPERFECT: CONSEQUENCES REAL AND IMAGINED
Perfectionists tend to think in absolute terms about what they do. In addition, they often think catastrophically; they take one small event, such as a mistake, and exaggerate the consequences until the repercussions are staggering. They react to one incident as if it were the beginning of the end, certain that disaster is just around the corner. You can see the Fixed Mindset at work in this kind of scenario.
These catastrophic expectations are even more intimidating when they are nameless and vague: “My life will be miserable if I’m not perfect!” But in what specific ways would life be miserable? It is often both interesting and helpful for procrastinators to articulate the nameless fantasies of dread that haunt them. Ask yourself the question, “What would happen if I weren’t perfect?” In addition to the general sense of doom you might feel at the thought of being less than exceptional, what specifics do you foresee? How bad would things get? What chain of events would lead up to the final catastrophe?
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