Social Psychology with Jeff

“Perfection is the enemy of profitability. Perfection is the enemy of success. You don’t need to be perfect, because nobody is.” – Mark Cuban

There are many challenges with being a PhD student or pursuing education or a purpose in life (either professionally or otherwise). Looking back now, my biggest challenge was focusing so much time on trying to be perfect. I literally spent years trying to figure out what is the perfect path for my research and the linear path of getting from A to B that I ignored some fundamental life truths:

1. Successful people have multiple projects happening at the same time, and are able to gain higher standings by having a return on some of their projects. The reason that they have as many successful projects is because they have many many more unsuccessful projects.
2. Few people are experts at everything.
3. Most experts have a strong support system who are emerging experts at specific things, who in turn become expert later on in their own right.
4. Most systems are designed to make people competent or good at many things (with varying degrees of importance) while becoming experts in a few (depending on their personal callings and specific needs in industry or academia).

For longer than I like to admit, I spent my PhD program trying to be perfect. I was scared of feeling inadequate and not deserving of my role as a PhD student. It was mostly an irrational fear, but it still impacted almost every decision I made in my PhD program. I was scared to turn down opportunities because I thought I needed those opportunities to be competitive. I gave everything equal time and attention, because I thought everything had to be perfect for me to be adequate. I spent so much time saying “yes” that I felt scared of what would happen if I ever said “no.”

I was scared of failing, which led me to pursue perfectionism. I justified it by saying: “I will never fail if I never stop trying to make it perfect.” I tried so hard to be perfect.

That led me to the Winter of 2018-2019. At this point, I had a decent number of poster and paper presentations at the Western Psychological Association and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Annual Conference. I had a decent professional and academic network. I had taught statistics four times and TA’ed for five others at the graduate level. My CV was somewhat respectable.

I also had no papers and was unsure of the direction that I wanted to pursue with my academic life. I knew I was good enough to get a PhD, but I was afraid that my projects were too trivial for the goals that I had. This website, which was supposed to capture my thoughts about the field of Psychology, remained relatively sparse. I gained 8% body fat and went from ~240 pounds to ~275 pounds.

I seemed happy because I was mostly happy. But my fear of failure led me to pursue perfectionism, even though it would not work long term. If I was perfect, people would like me. If I was perfect, I could have job security. If I was perfect, I could justify going on this journey in the first place.

I could ignore failure if I always said it was because I was pursuing perfection. That is, until it hit me straight in the face. It felt like everything I thought I knew was a lie, and that all of my pursuits were for naught. I felt alone and uncertain about who I was and what I was doing with my life.

I realized that failure happens–true irreversible failure that makes you question who you are and why you made every decision you did, and if you could make different decisions afterwards. Pursuing perfectionism is a false shield that doesn’t protect anything long-term, and none of the benefits that come from learning through failure occurs if we don’t recognize why we failed.

Separately, failure can happen because life happens sometimes. It turns out that when failure hits you right in the face, you stop worrying about having to be perfect. I just knew that I had to do something to stop the emotional triage. For me, that meant switching from trying to do perfect work to doing good work. When failure and uncertainty hit that hard, doing good work becomes the search for a life raft. I thought that doing good work would get me to a place where I could figure out what to do next.

And then, something unexpected happened. Doing good work led me get papers off my desk that stalled for months or years. Being a good lecturer led to new views on teaching and the most successful classes that I have ever thought. Doing good projects led to new opportunities where I could learn more about who I am as a scientist and a researcher. I became a better researcher by trying to pursue good work and being in an environment that supported doing good work.

Being a good friend led to more meaningful relationships. I feel like I can be truly honest and not worry about saying the wrong thing for fear of exclusion or ridicule. I think I am finally there for people in the way that I would want them to be there for me, and our lives are better for it.

Doing good by my health led me to lose ~7% of the body fat that I gained (getting my weight back to ~242 pounds and still trending downwards).

Focusing on doing good work did not make me happier directly. But it allowed me to see the world and myself more clearly. I became calmer, less anxious, and more able to accept who I am today while attempting to become a better version of myself tomorrow. That, in turn, has made me more at peace than I have been since 2007.

Perfectionism is the enemy of doing good work, but it is a hard lesson to learn. But my life is better after learning that lesson and acting upon what I learned. I’m creating content now that can be evaluated on how good it is with the hope of becoming better.

Thank you to all who checked in on me in 2019. We truly are in this together, but you all were there when I needed you all to be there for me. I finally feel like I am good, and I am lucky enough to have you all in my life. I am where I am today because you all were good people when I needed you all to be good.

Focusing on being good has given me confidence in my voice again. I don’t know when I will update the website, but I can promise that it will (1) be relevant to something related to graduate studies or psychology and (2) be an attempt at being good while adding to the conversation at large. It will grow into a voice that I hope adds to the world we share.