Micro Class - How to quit being a perfectionist! (And become an optimalist)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, guys, what's up? This is Brian with another optimal living 101. We're going to talk about how to quit being a perfectionist and become an optimalist. Now, I don't know about you, but I've struggled with perfectionism during my life, and I found these ideas from Tal Ben Shahar. He's one of my favorite teachers. He wrote a book called the Pursuit of Perfect where he talks about perfectionism, and he juxtaposes it with this idea of optimalism. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. And I want to kick this one off with a little quote. It's from Tal. He says the optimalism ideal is not a distant shore to be reached, but a distant star that guides us and can never be reached. As Carl Rogers pointed out, the good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. Amazing stuff. And I just love the idea that our ideals, we all have ideals. That's a great thing. But we got to remember they're more like distant stars than distant shores. We're never going to get there. John Wooden tells us, go for perfectionist, go for perfection, but know you're never going to get it. And when you embrace reality like that, which is one of the key ways to move from perfectionism to optimalism, you're in a good position. So let's take a look at the difference between perfectionism and optimalism. Tal tells us that scientists look at perfectionism, and they say that there's a positive expression and a negative expression of perfectionism, and that the positive expression is actually adaptive and healthy, leads to joy. It's a good thing. But the negative perfectionism is maladaptive. It's neurotic, and it leads to our exos. Negative, positive. Now, he says they're so different, these types of perfectionism, that we should call them by two different names. The negative is our traditional perfectionism, sad face. The positive is optimalism, happy face. They're so different that perfectionism, optimalism, awesome. So what makes them different? What's the major difference between them? Tal tells us about a lot of differences, but the primary one is their relationship to reality. Optimalists embrace reality. They know they will never be perfect. They embrace reality. They know there are constraints to reality. The perfectionist, on the other hand, fails to embrace reality. They live in this naive, idealistic sense where they actually think that they're going to be perfect someday, well, that's a good way to be maladaptive and neurotic and experience the dreaded exos. Turn that frown upside down by embracing reality. It's awesome stuff. Now, one of the ways we embrace reality is we fail more. The perfectionist simply can't fail. It's just, it's. It's death right now. I used to live from this place. It would be absolutely horrible if I failed at anything. Now, what happens when you do that? Well, you tend to hang out in your little comfort zone. We talked about in this how to conquer your fear in 30 seconds video, right? Your fear overwhelms you and just crams you right into your comfort zone. You're afraid of failing right now. When you're willing to fail, all of a sudden you've got this freedom. And again, as we talked about over here, you bust through your fear and you have infinite possibility. Very, very cool. The optimalist knows this, the perfectionist doesn't. So we want to embrace reality, know we're going to fail, and be willing to go out and do it. Now, to do that, we want to adapt our mindset. So Mindset is actually the name of a book written by a woman named Carol Dweck, who's another one of the world's leading research scientists. Amazing human being. She talks about the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The fixed mindset is basically, I'm good or I'm not good, right? I was born good or I wasn't born good at this or that or this or that or whatever. I'm either a good business person or I'm not a good business person. And if I fail at this business or make a mistake or lose some money or whatever, or, you know, end a relationship or write a stupid blog post or whatever, that means I am worthless. I'm an idiot. It's fixed. It's a tough place to come from. We want to shift from that to a growth mindset. The person with the growth mindset, an optimalist, looks at life and says, look, life is a classroom. I'm going to make as many experiments as I possibly can. I'm going to try to get to be a better human being, a better business person or whatever, a better writer, etc. And my first novel doesn't sell. Okay, cool. What can I learn from that? It doesn't mean I'm a terrible novelist. It means I've got some stuff to learn. I have a growth mindset. Heidi Grant Halvorson, who's One of my favorite people on the planet. She's become a virtual friend and has taught classes with us. Actually a real friend, but haven't met her in person yet. Teaches classes with us at the Academy and is just an extraordinary writer and teacher. Check her out@heidi granthalverson.com she talks about the difference between that she happens to be Carol Dweck's protege and one of her students. She talks about the difference between being good and getting better. If all you care about is being good, you kind of have this fixed mindset and you're always trying to be good and look good and never fall short of anyone's expectations and all that kind of stuff. Again, tough place to be. You want to move into a getting better mindset. Getting better mindset is very much like the growth mindset, where you're consistently trying to, you guessed it, get better. Now, with a getting better mindset, everything that happens to you is fantastic. Right. You do something that works in business. That's exciting. You do something that doesn't work in business. Awesome. What about it didn't work? Can you unpack it and see how you can get a little bit better? You get rejected from a publisher. Cool. Can you ask for some feedback on what was it they liked, what didn't they like? Right. An investor doesn't want to invest in their business. Cool. What do you think was going on there? How do you get better versus think that? Wow, if that person rejected me, that must mean I'm not good. I should give up, I hate myself. Continue the conversation line there that a perfectionist goes through, which is maladaptive, which leads to neuroticism, which leads to the bucket of eat sauce. So shift your mindset from fixed to growth, from being good to getting better, and you will take significant steps in being an optimalist. As Tal says, one more thing here and we're going to go off on literally hundreds and thousands of these little ideas in all the notes, or I'm sorry, in all the videos, but here's one more. An optimalist tends to be a benefit finder. They're looking for things that are going right. They find the proverbial silver lining in the cloud. They make lemonade out of lemons. Whereas the perfectionist is a fault finder. They're always looking at what went wrong. Fault finder, benefit finder, perfectionist, optimalist. Where are you? Do you spend more time finding faults in people and things and in yourself? Where do you find yourself spending more time looking for what's going right? You want to be more of a benefit finder. And it doesn't mean you ignore reality. Right. We embrace reality, but we also are optimistic. We put a realistic, rational, positive, best interpretation on what's happening in our life, including, wow, that failure was instructive for me. I learned a lot. These are my values that got clarified out of it. It's an opportunity to get a little bit better. Etc. Etc. Etc. So there you go. Optimalism versus Perfectionism. We want to look at our ideals as distant stars, not distant shores. You're never gonna get there. But if you use your ideals as a distant star, as a compass if you will, there's always an opportunity to get back on track and give it your next best shot as someone who's in the getting better growth mindset. So there you go. Become an optimalist. Quit being a perfectionist. Hope you dug it. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you have any other ideas you'd like me to cover. And really hope you enjoyed leave. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See ya. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that micro class. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson me. Two basic things one our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. 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