PNTV: The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar (#6)

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes TV episode number seven. Today we're going to do a quick overview of some of my favorite big ideas from a great book, the Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben Shahar. We're going to use my philosopher's notes 6 page PDF overview of this book where I pull out about 10 of my favorite big ideas, etc. Very excited about it and this is actually the second episode in a row we're focusing on Tall Ben Shahar. Last one was on his great book called Happier. He's probably my favorite teacher right now, period. He's amazing. He is a former Harvard professor to taught the most popular class on positive psychology at Harvard. It's the most popular class in Harvard's history in fact, or it was anyway, super cool guy who integrates the science of happiness with kind of a fun, light hearted spirit and optimism of the self development world. So good guy. Great book. If you are like me, a recovering perfectionist, I think you'll really, really love this book. And I think you'll love another book we're going to do soon that I do in the Philosopher's Notes called the Now Habit. Two great books on dealing with perfectionism, the Pursuit of Perfect and the Now Habit. For right now we are going to get into a few of my favorite big ideas on the pursuit of perfect. So the first big idea and kind of the idea of the book is that there are two forms of perfectionism. I didn't know this but apparently psychologists differentiate between healthy perfectionists. There are such things, such people and unhealthy perfectionists. The healthy ones are healthy, they function, etc. The unhealthy ones are more neurotic, they're unhealthy. Now Tal Ben Shahar said, look, they're so different, the unhealthy, the unhealthy and the healthy perfectionist. And I'm actually going to create a new word. And he calls them optimalists. He calls the healthy perfectionist an optimalist and the unhealthy perfectionist a perfectionist. So the book is all about that perfectionism versus optimalism. And I love the idea. And one of the big differences between the two groups of people, the perfectionist and the optimalist, is the optimalist embraces reality. The perfectionist doesn't deal with reality. They want everything to be perfect all the time. You might have noticed that's not quite how reality works. So the optimalist realizes that, appreciates it and creates an optimal life in the face of constraints of reality. So the book is all about how we can go about doing that. And his point is that you're never going to get to the point of being a total optimalist. We're always going to have some perfectionist tendencies in our minds, right in our lives and how we show up in the world. And he says that it's not a distant shore. We're going to get to optimalism. It's more like a guiding star, which I think is just a great vision. And it's actually the perfect way to look at perfectionism and optimalism. Perfectionists would want to get there. Optimalists realize we never get there. We have a guiding kind of light and a set of ideals and a set of values we're moving toward, but there is no final destination we're ever going to get to. It's a really cool idea, really big idea that the bulk of the book is based on. So some practical ideas of how we can become more optimalistic in our lives rather than perfectionistic. One of my favorite ones is this idea of becoming a benefit finder rather than a fault finder. So a fault finder finds everything that's going wrong in their lives, with their relationships with other people, etc. Faults. Find faults. Faults, faults false. Now, a perfectionist tends to be a fault finder. We've got a special guest apparently coming through the show today. Do you need to get through? Give us a wave. We've got a goddess walking through. There we go.

Nice.

All right, so the studio is inhabited by goddesses today. So back to the show. There she goes again. That's awesome. All right. I'm going to find benefits in that. The fault finder, the perfectionist in me, would be upset with that and would find fault in the whole situation. Right. The benefit finder in me. And I would stop this and restart and all that kind of stuff. I'm committed to doing these in pretty much one take. So we're going to have fun with it. The benefit finder would find the joy in that experience. Right. There's a beauty to it, there's fun, there's playfulness, etc. So what in your life are you approaching as a perfectionist where you're finding all the faults? Maybe a challenge you have in your life.

And.

And in the note and in the book, we talk about the opportunity to find the benefits. What benefits can you identify in a current challenge in your life? Identify three of them. So whatever's stressing you out, you Know pretty well the faults to that. But can you find the benefits? Right? Really cool idea. And then can you become more of a benefit finder in your day to day life, in your moment to moment experience, rather than a fault finder. Really big idea. Another big idea he talks about a lot in the book is the idea of failure. And he encourages his students to fail more, not less, and redefine our relationship to failure. And his big thing is, look, we gotta go out, we gotta push our edges. If you remember from the last video, he talked about comfort zones, stretch zones, and panic zones. We want to play in the stretch zone and we want to allow ourselves to fail and ideally fail more often. And as we do so, we pick ourselves up, we learn, we become stronger, more resilient. We make great distinctions. In the note, I talk about a couple other great people who talk about failure as well. We talk about this throughout all the notes. But one of my favorites is Michael Beckwith, the guy from the Secret who wrote a great book called Spiritual Liberation that we do a note on as well. He says, look, even enlightened people burn their bagels on occasion, right? None of us are ever going to be perfect. And he says that mistakes should be viewed as mistakes. It's just a mistake, not a big deal. Why don't we just shoot it again, right? We have a mistake, not a big deal. Just go at it again. Really cool idea. Way to reframe failures and mistakes, etc. I love that. And then Michael Jordan. I'll actually, I'll link to a video of Michael Jordan, arguably one of the greatest athletes ever, who talks about the fact that he. He failed over and over and over again. And it was his willingness to fail that dictated why he was so successful. So check out the link below the video. I'll put that in and blog it so you can enjoy that. That's awesome. So we need to reorient our relationship to failure. Perfectionists can't deal with failure. It's a life or death kind of thing. Optimalists realize they embrace reality. Failure happens. They can embrace it and move on, and they can alchemize it into an extraordinary experience. I actually just did an interview with a woman. I'll put up the link to that as well, where I talk about the fact that once I was raising money and I had raised money from a billionaire in his family. Awesome guy. And he introduced me to his friends and he had about a minute and a half that he introduced me, and he chose to tell the story about one of my biggest Failures. I had lost about a half a million dollars and in the first version of my last business. And he said he liked the fact that my nose has been bloodied. He said, and I know how to get off the mat and go back and find my passion and go for it again. And I thought it was amazing that he choose to talk about my failure as one of my strengths and one of the reasons why he believed in me and was suggesting to his friends that they believe in me as well and invest in our business. Amazing stuff. So that's a big idea of failure. So we gotta deal with reality and embrace the fact that things go wrong on occasion. What else do we want to talk about? Lots of big ideas. In the note, let's go into recovery. He talks about the idea that athletes have physical injuries. When they over train at times or they perform, they get injuries. He says we have psychological injuries. They come in the form of fatigue or stress or anxiety. They're really psychological injuries. And one of the ways we can deal with those injuries is rest, is recovery. And he says it's not that people work too hard, it's that they don't recover enough. He's got a great quote. JP Morgan once said, I can do a year's worth of work in nine months, but not in 12. So this idea that we got to build in recoveries, we've got to find time to take breaks. He talks about micro mid and macro breaks. We'll talk about that. Check out the note for more on that. And then the final big idea here is the platinum rule. So we know the golden rule, treat others like you want to be treated. But he says, do not do unto yourself what you would not do unto others. So if you wouldn't do something to someone else, don't do it to yourself. It's amazing how much harsher we are with ourselves in our minds than we would ever be with anyone else. So he says, do, do not do unto yourself what you would not do unto others. That's the platinum rule.

So there you go.

There's a very, very quick look at the pursuit of perfect. Hope you enjoyed it. Tall Ben Shahar is awesome. Get into his stuff and if you haven't gotten the notes yet, what are you waiting for? Look forward to sharing more with you. Have an awesome day.

See you.

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