What Is Perfectionism?

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Perfectionism is a preoccupation with control, which makes us falsely believe that we create our own luck.

Accepting the role of luck can help steer us away from fixating on rewards to focus on our stable traits.

Marcus Aurelius argued that beauty doesn't need praise to be beautiful, as that quality is self-evident.

Perfectionism, at bottom, is an outsized sense of self-importance, or control. Taking on all of the responsibility of both success and failure eliminates the possibility of acknowledging the most feared aspect of life to many of us: chance. Therefore, emotionally, perfectionism is akin to gambling addiction. Intellectually, many gamblers can easily tell you they know how significant luck is to betting. Yet, despite that, their reactions betray another, more fundamental, reality.

People with gambling addiction tend to feel like losers and winners, as though they’re the sole or main source of complex outcomes. Some feel as though they’re special because they’re lucky (at least at times, such as when they say they’re ‘due for a win”), so they account for luck but do so in a personal manner—in this way, they’re still the reason they won. Others believe winning and losing stem from intelligence, using fallacious thinking to convince themselves they’re great players, even if it’s because they merely have the courage to persist in the face of defeat (I’m not referring to poker since it requires more skill than your average casino game). While this........

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