If It's Not Perfect, It's Shit

I want to talk about the most polite-looking form of self-sabotage I know. It dresses up like discipline. It tells you it's just high standards. It's perfectionism, and it might be the single most common thing holding my clients back.

Here's the thought it plants in your head: if it's not perfect, it's shit. There's no middle. Either you nailed it or you blew it. Either the day was clean or the day was trash. That binary is a lie, and it's an expensive one.

Let me tell you how I learned it.

The performance of the day

Senior year of high school, I sang "Bring Him Home" from Les Mis for a solo and ensemble competition. I'd prepared for months. It was my favorite song, right in my range, and I worked my ass off on it. I walked into that room, sang for the judges, and walked out replaying every single mistake. Came in a quarter beat early here. Went flat in the fourth measure. Took too shallow a breath and couldn't hold the dynamic I wanted. My head was a highlight reel of everywhere I fell short of perfect, because perfect was the only thing I'd allowed myself to want.

I blew it. Except I didn't. I got the highest score in my room. I was named performance of the day. My choir teacher walked out beside me and told me, right then, that it was incredible.

In my head, that was bullshit. All I could hear was the flat note.

If you tend toward perfectionism, you have your own version of that story. Everyone in the room thought you crushed it, and all you could see was the seam where it wasn't perfect. That's not a character flaw you invented. We're wired to remember the negative more sharply than the positive; the ancestor who remembered which berry made him sick outlived the one who didn't. Useful for survival. Brutal when your brain turns that same machinery on your own performance and flags everything that wasn't flawless.

Where it actually costs you

Perfectionism doesn't just make you feel bad after the fact. It stops progress in two specific ways, and I see both constantly.

First, it stops you from starting. You can't begin until the conditions are perfect; until you have the time, the energy, the money, the right gear, the right plan. So you never begin. When I started this podcast I had no business starting. I recorded from my car. I recorded on my phone. I'd interviewed exactly nobody outside a school newspaper. I started anyway, and I got better BECAUSE I started. If I'd waited for ready, there'd be no show.

Second, it stops you once you've started. My daughter draws a picture, makes one small mistake, rips the page out of her scratch pad, balls it up, throws it away. You've done the adult version. The drawing was good. The cake was good. It wasn't perfect, so you trashed it and started over. That's wasted effort, and worse, you just destroyed the one objective piece of data you could have measured your next attempt against.

And in nutrition, this is the whole ballgame. You're hitting your targets all day, then you go over at dinner. The perfectionist brain says: well, the day's blown, may as well have the cake too. Next morning: already off track, McDonald's on the way to work. Then lunch. Then screw it, open the wine. One imperfect meal becomes a lost day becomes a lost week. That's not weakness. That's the binary doing exactly what it does. Once you've "violated the protocol," the whole thing reads as worthless, so you let it all hang out.

That's how perfectionism leads straight to bingeing, and then it eats your self-esteem on the way out. You feel like you broke a promise to yourself. You tell yourself "I always do this," which isn't even true; you don't quit your job because you had one bad day at work, you don't abandon your kids because you parented imperfectly on Tuesday. You only hold the impossible standard in a few rooms. Usually the rooms that matter most to you.

Five things that actually help

I'm not a psychologist. I've just lived this and coached a lot of people through it. Here's what works.

Reflect on your expectations, area by area. Most of us aren't perfectionists everywhere. You probably give yourself grace on a missed volunteer deadline but demand flawlessness from your diet and your training. Find the rooms where the standard is cranked too high.

Ask why. Where did that expectation come from? A parent, a coach, a boss? For me it was football, where we ran a drill literally called the perfect drill; five plays in a row, everyone hits their assignment, and one miss sent us back to zero. We were twelve. That stuff gets internalized. Having high standards is good. I have them for myself and my athletes. Perfection is not one of them.

Recognize that perfect does not exist. There's no perfect day, no perfect life, no perfect set. It's a false dichotomy. You can chase it as a direction and never expect to arrive, but the moment you believe it's actually reachable, it becomes a trap. Set it down.

Watch your language. After a rough night, do you climb into the car and call yourself a fat piece of shit? I used to. The way you talk to yourself builds the identity you carry. So flip it: give yourself the advice you'd give a friend. If your best friend said they ate like garbage for three days and the scale jumped, you wouldn't call them worthless. You'd say that sucks, why do you think it happened, how can I help, let's get back on track. Talk to yourself like someone you love, because you should.

Fail publicly. This is perfectionism's exposure therapy. Same way you cure a phobia in small doses, you blunt perfectionism by doing things where you might visibly fall short and surviving it. Start the podcast before you're ready. There aren't many perfectionist stand-up comedians; they've bombed too many times in public for the perfectionism to survive.

One more, and it's the real one: look outside yourself. If I'd just believed my choir teacher instead of the flat note, I'd have walked out of that room proud. Get the external read. Ask people how they actually see your work. You're almost never doing as badly as the voice in your head insists.

This is general principle, not a prescription for your specific situation. If the binary thinking runs into disordered eating or something darker, talk to a professional; I'm a big believer in talk therapy and it's almost always good advice when the issue is psychological.

Keep growing. Keep getting a little better every day. Just stop demanding perfect, because perfect was never on the menu.

Listen to the full episode here.

If perfectionism has had you stuck on the start line, or pulling the rip cord every time a day goes sideways, that's exactly the kind of thing I coach people through. Come fill out the form at /apply and let's build something you can actually stay with. I've never turned anyone away over money.

Vokse eller dø. — Coach Jordan