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Nobody’s perfect, but that doesn’t seem to stop people from trying. And why not? There are lots of good reasons for wanting to be perfect. Some professions, for example, greatly benefit from their inherent perfectionism. This is especially true of professions where the consequences of mistakes would be catastrophic, where the human or the financial costs of errors are simply too great to bear. Indeed, the higher the potential for catastrophe, the more necessary and warranted is the perfectionistic behavior. Consequently, among the most perfectionistic people you’ll ever meet are bridge-building engineers, skyscraper architects, nuclear physicists, software engineers, and brain surgeons. I, for one, thank God for that. If you ever had the misfortune of requiring brain surgery and had to choose between a pursed-lipped, anal-retentive surgical tactician or a giddy, free-wheeling improvisationalist, who would you choose?

The trouble with perfectionism is that it impedes our ability to take risks. Perfectionists are better suited for mitigating risks than for taking them. This mostly stems from their almost obsessive preoccupation with anticipating what can go wrong. Perfectionists are prone to “catastrophizing,” focusing on worst-case scenarios in order to account for, and control, every possible negative outcome. This, in turn, lends itself toward a doom-n-gloom outlook when facing a risk. Thus, risks themselves are seen through a prism of negativity that not only makes the risk-taking experience unenjoyable, but through the power of expectancy often sets it up for failure as well. Which brings us to Right Risk Principle 8: Be perfectly imperfect. Here you will look at some of the ways that perfectionism interferes with risk-taking, and why making a commitment to being perfectly imperfect is one of the best things you can do while pursuing, and taking, your risk.

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The Value of Mistakes

Whether you have decided to pursue your risk, or if you have just jumped off your risk platform, you will have a more difficult time of it if you are a perfectionist. Risk-taking is inherently a mistake-driven process, characterized by a whole lot of trial and a whole lot of error. What perfectionists hate most are mistakes. To perfectionists, a mistake is more than an error; it is a failure that reflects on them personally. You can even hear it in their language. After making a mistake an average person will say something like “My idea didn’t work so I tried something else,” but a perfectionist will scornfully lament, “I tried my idea and it was an utter failure. I should have known it was a dumb idea. I won’t make that mistake again!”

When mistakes equate with failure, risk-taking is viewed as the surest path to dejection and humiliation. Thus the dispositions of perfectionists and risk-takers are often diametrically opposite. These differences are well captured by Dr. Monica Ramirez Basco in her insightful book on perfectionism, Never Good Enough. She explains that risk-takers are unlike perfectionists in that they “do not expect themselves to always be right or always have great ideas. But they know that if they keep trying, they will hit upon a winner. If their ideas are rejected, they might get their feelings hurt but they will recover quickly. The consequences of failure for these people do not feel as great as they would to the perfectionist.”¹

Risk-takers view mistakes as an inevitable part of the risk-taking experience. Unlike perfectionists, who categorically assume that perfection is both necessary and attainable, the risk-taker knows better. It is not that risk-takers want to make mistakes. Rather they see mistakes as valuable sources of data that will ultimately help them attain their goals. When someone pointed out to Thomas Edison that in inventing the incandescent light bulb he had performed 10,000 failed experiments, he is purported to have replied, “I have not failed. I just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”

Risk-takers hold the view that, though painful, mistakes are to be expected. In springboard diving, for example, a diver knows that to progress in the sport he or she must take on dives with greater difficulty, literally translated in the sport through a mathematical calculation that signifies each dive’s degree of difficulty, or what divers refer to as DD. The dives with the highest DD are those with the highest risk. Divers know that in exchange for a repertoire of dives with a higher average DD, they will likely have to endure a bunch of belly flops; welts come with the territory. But they also know that dives with a high DD are those with the biggest potential payoff. At some point in his or her career, a diver will either commit to pursing high DD, or not. And at the elite levels, there are no low DD divers. Likewise, if you want to be a Right Risk-taker, eventually you will have to fully commit yourself to the risk, and all the hardships and imperfections that come with it.

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Perfectionism and Control

Perfectionism has few rivals in its ability to push people away. At best, the perfectionist will try to meticulously account for every possible negative outcome, causing them to be painstakingly slow. At worst, they are overdominating and picayune. As the vice president of program services for Executive Adventure, an Atlanta-based experiential team building company, I witnessed many examples of perfectionism’s corrosive effects. One example in particular stands out. I was facilitating a strategic planning effort for an international service organization. During the session, one board member, a British chap named Percy, was hindering the group’s progress in re-evaluating their strategic direction. Percy was the only executive I ever saw who actually wore an ascot—which complemented his monogrammed blue blazer. Whenever a board member tossed out an idea, Percy would give a look of disdain and condescendingly explain, ad nauseam, why the idea would put the organization at risk. It became apparent that without some type of intervention, the board would leave the planning session having made no progress at all. Rather than confronting Percy directly, I decided to do an experiential activity so that the negative consequences of his perfectionist behavior would be brought to light in a less threatening but more impactful way.

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Under the guise of wanting to break up the monotony of the working session, I took them outside to do an activity called Satellite Retrieval. People often assume that experiential team-building activities are shared feats of sweat-inducing physical gamesmanship. While some games are indeed physical, many are about as exhausting as rocking in a rocking chair. The power of Satellite Retrieval doesn’t come from shared physical triumph. No, the power lies in the activity’s ability to create a pressure-filled environment in which the dysfunctional behaviors a group demonstrates at work are replicated in a harmless game with no lasting consequences for failure.

The goal of the activity is to help the group catch themselves being themselves. The activity works best if accompanied by a scenario customized to the needs of the group. In this case, a top-secret satellite, which contained the secret to strategic planning success, was falling back into Earth’s atmosphere. The board was to build a retrieval device that would catch the satellite without breaking it. The satellite was actually an egg that was suspended 10 feet above the ground with some string, a hair net, and a bull clip. To build their retrieval device, the board was given a bag of material containing things like cotton balls, paper clips, paper cups, dental floss, tacks, coffee filters, straws. I instructed the board to divide into two groups: a design team and a construction team. Six members would be responsible for designing the retrieval device, the other six for constructing the device according to the exact specifications of the design team. Finally, I gave them a strict deadline of 20 minutes to build their device and catch the falling satellite.

As in the planning session, Percy’s dominating personality came through. He personally selected which board members would be on each team, based on his assessment of who was a better thinker and who was a better doer. He himself would be on the design team because, as he jokingly said, “I am the only one I can trust to engineer this bloody thing right!” With the clock ticking, the board separated into the two groups. That’s when Percy became an embellished version of himself. Every design idea offered by his fellow team members was shown by Percy to be flawed. There he was, a caricature of himself, shooting down everyone’s ideas, rolling his eyes in frustration, using his facial expressions to transmit just how dumb he thought the group was. One by one, each member of the design team started to shut down until no one offered any more ideas. Exasperated and at his wit’s end, Percy chided the team, telling them, “I’ll just design the goddamn thing myself!”

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The construction team was watching the ensuing dynamics in dismay. As Percy rummaged through the material bag with increasing desperation, they urged him to hurry up. Fifteen minutes had gone by and they would need the remaining time to build the device. Percy was trying to make sense of the materials as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, holding up each item and cocking it back and forth to see how it fit with the other items. There must be some discernible logic to it, he thought.

As the clock rounded 17 minutes both teams began pleading with him to stop slowing the process and move on. Desperate, Percy began scribbling out a design on the back of a coffee filter. Finally, at 18 minutes, he handed off his rumpled design to the construction team. They were livid. His scribbling was as complex as it was illegible. One construction team member crumpled the design into a little ball and tossed it in disgust at Percy’s feet. With less than a minute left, Percy began furiously constructing the design himself as the other team members watched with their arms crossed. Without the benefit of anyone else’s input, Percy had built a half-assed contraption that stood as a monument to his own arrogance. With 10 seconds left, one board member started counting down indifferently, “Ten, nine, eight, seven. . . .” As Percy squeezed the bull clip, the entire board watched in resignation as the egg missed the device entirely, smashing all over the ground.

The purpose of an experiential activity is never the activity itself—it is the dialogue that the activity provokes. Indeed, the real risks occur in the facilitated debrief because that’s when the group becomes truly vulnerable. The Satellite Retrieval had brought a lot to the surface. As I gathered the board around me, it was clear from the looks on their faces that they were seething. After reminding them that it was just a game, I told them to be silent for 60 seconds.

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Debriefing an activity that played out as harshly as this one has to be done with delicacy. Sometimes the best way to diffuse a group’s anger and help them get some perspective is to give them a moment to regain their composure. The ensuing dialogue was among the richest I had ever facilitated. The board discussed how exasperated they had become with Percy in the game and how it reflected their feelings about him stifling the strategic planning process earlier in the day. They talked about how dejecting it felt when he shot down their ideas and how it caused them to check out. They talked about how frustrating it was never to be able to meet his standards and how his negativity permeated the atmosphere of the entire session. He took all the fun out of things.

All of the resentments that the board had stuffed down in the name of professional decorum had erupted to the surface through a simple game. When the purging was over, Percy, lips quivering, said softly, “I am so embarrassed.” Few things are as disarming as an expression of humility. It was obvious to everyone that for Percy to have become this humble, the experience must have been tremendously humiliating. He went on to explain that he was just trying to prevent mistakes, and that it was hard for him to trust the group . . . or anyone else for that matter. He just wanted to be a good board member, someone who contributed to the safety and well-being of the organization. He noted how undeserving he had felt when he was selected for the board and how he had promised himself that he would do everything in his power to deserve this honor. Now he felt that he had failed them. Then, with his head bowed down, he told them that he would resign if they felt it would be in the best interest of the organization.

Percy had taken a risk. He had let the board see that the perfectionist was really just a man cloaking the burden of his imperfection. Slowly, the other board members began letting their guard down, adding how they too had contributed to the board’s slow progress by enabling Percy’s behavior and by acquiescing whenever he challenged their ideas. Some commented that they actually valued Percy’s thoroughness and that they viewed him as a sentinel of the organization, protecting it from harm. No one wanted him to resign, just to ease up a bit and consider the input of the other board members. When they went back inside and resumed the strategic planning, it seemed as if a blockage had been removed from the way they connected with each other, and they were able to make substantial improvements to their strategic direction.

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Being perfectly imperfect means recognizing that our control over outcomes has limits. If every outcome were controllable, if every mistake preventable, it wouldn’t be a risk, it would be a certainty. Risk-taking involves chance and approximation. But more than that, it involves an encounter with our fallibility. Though our risks may indeed turn out perfectly, we as risk-takers will always have imperfections. Rather than, like Percy, being intolerant to imperfection, you should strive for excellence while also acknowledging the imperfect nature of risk, and the imperfect nature of yourself.

Getting Honest About Our Imperfections

For a lot of people, making a commitment to being perfectly imperfect is simply too hard to do because it means getting rigorously honest with yourself. This point is illustrated by the problem of alcoholism. One of the most commonly shared symptoms of alcoholism is denial. Alcoholics are notorious for engaging in all sorts of risky behavior while denying the existence of a drinking problem. I once had a friend whose drinking had caused him to bankrupt a business, demolish a new car, have his driver’s license revoked, and ultimately destroy his marriage. Amidst all the wreckage, he could still look me square in the eyes and deny that he had a drinking problem, arguing, “Things could always be worse.” Against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, alcoholics will deny the existence of a problem. What alcoholics deny is reality. As a rejection of reality, denial is a form of delusion that protects the alcoholic from the pain associated with assuming responsibility for the wreckage they have made of their lives.

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Recovery for the alcoholic begins with an acknowledgment of his or her reality. It is no coincidence that the first of the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the most successful treatment program for alcoholism, begins with two words: We admitted. These two words represent the end of denial and the beginning of reality acceptance. It is only after alcoholics can admit that they indeed have a problem, that they can begin to accept responsibility for dealing with it. As James Baldwin once said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

It is easy to see denial of reality in the extreme case of the alcoholic, but all people, to a greater or lesser degree, turn away from their imperfections, denying a sizeable piece of their own reality. Most of us prefer the safety of our denial to the uncomfortable exposure of our imperfections. We deny and repress our failings just so we can live with ourselves. But that which is repressed always rebels. When we deny our imperfections, we subconsciously strengthen their ability to direct and influence our lives. Propelled by the coiled spring of denial, the drinker binges, the brownnoser panders, the blamer condemns, and the controller oppresses. When it comes to our imperfections, they simply will not be denied.

Making the commitment to be perfectly imperfect is extremely difficult because it means facing the upsetting parts of your reality. Consider these upsetting questions:

• Are you a coward?
• Are you lazy?
• Are you stingy?
• Are you out of shape or overweight?
• Are you addicted to cigarettes?
• Are you prejudiced?
• Are you a bad spouse?
• Are you dominating?
• Are you defensive?
• Are you a blamer?
• Are you unhappy?

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If you glanced over the list quickly, consider reading it again slowly. It is easy to turn away from such questions because they force you to consider your imperfections. Denial is an elaborate costume that by disguising our shortcomings keeps us hidden from ourselves. But when we acknowledge only those aspects of ourselves that are pleasing, we remain incomplete in our level of self-awareness. Because it prevents us from developing a full and intimate relationship with ourselves, denial is a form of intimacy avoidance. A deep relationship with yourself, or anyone else for that matter, depends on taking the risk of self-disclosure. When you hide behind the mask of denial, your relationship to yourself remains shallow and insincere. Just as we are uncomfortable around people who are not genuine, when we deny the fullness of ourselves, warts and all, we grow uncomfortable with our own company. Denial is cowardice personified, and no one likes to hang around a coward . . . least of all when the coward is us.

Facing Yourself

Being perfectly imperfect means being rigorously honest. It means to stop denying or repressing your less-than-perfect parts, and to boldly face reality, in all its starkness. As the great American artist Walter Anderson once said, “Our lives improve only when we take chances—and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.”

The point of facing our imperfections is not to root them out so we can be perfect. Rather, we should acquaint ourselves with them, so that our self-knowledge is more complete. When we do this, we are better able to direct their influence over us, often converting them from sources of maladaptive behavior to a more adaptive kind. For example, ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a strong need for attention. I can remember when my parents had their friends over for cocktails, I would stand on my head (literally!) and sing The Rain in Spain. It is really no surprise, then, that this need for attention would eventually translate into me becoming an exhibition high diver. Unlike polo, high diving is not a sport of kings, it is a sport of hotdogs.

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Unfortunately, my need for attention turned me into a showoff. It always had to be about me. Finally, when I was 31, my live-in girlfriend walked out on me, explaining with exasperation, I am tired of clapping for you. Having already been through a failed relationship, it became obvious that I was part of the problem. But I was utterly clueless as to what to do about it. Heck, I didn’t even know what it was. Brokenhearted and disenchanted, I finally sought therapy.

To enter therapy is to risk facing your imperfections. Through this process I was able to identify the reasons for my self-centeredness and to recognize how it had spilt over into every area of my life. Over time I learned how to accommodate my need for attention in more productive ways. Truthfully, I am still selfish and still have a strong need for attention. Now, however, I fulfill this need by allowing it to serve others. My profession affords me the opportunity to speak to large audiences. While I find addressing a room full of eager minds extremely gratifying, I believe my message about “purposeful risk-taking” benefits them also. My imperfect need for attention now serves both me and the people I address. And that is perfectly fine with me.

My story’s happy ending is that after a five-year breakup, the woman who left me because she was tired of clapping is now my wife. Though she still claps a bit, I spend a lot more time clapping for her now too.

Be Perfectly Imperfect

I read somewhere that many great quilt makers like to sew an imperfect stitch among their patchwork. They do this as an act of homage—the idea being that only God has the right to be perfect. Imperfection provides a needed contrast for beauty to emerge so that it can be most appreciated. To be perfectly imperfect is to allow our imperfections to distinguish our more admirable qualities. Perhaps it is for this reason that, as my Grandmother used to say, “Everything God makes has a crack in it.”

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And how can you commit yourself to being perfectly imperfect? By replacing self-rejection with self-acceptance. By valuing your shortcomings for giving you your character, your quirkiness, and your humanness. By giving yourself a break and by recognizing that mistakes are not personal failings, but mile-markers on the winding road of progress. When you commit yourself to being perfectly imperfect, you come to appreciate risk-taking as a process of discovery, full of shortfalls and setbacks, but also full of serendipity and satisfaction. Being perfectly imperfect doesn’t mean triumphing over our imperfections, it means triumphing with them.

Perfectionism: The Perfect Killjoy

A final thought about perfectionism. Perfectionism doesn’t just inhibit our ability to take a risk, it inhibits our ability to enjoy it as well. Even risks that are deemed successful leave the perfectionist dissatisfied. Nobody’s perfect, not even the perfectionist. And that presents an unsolvable riddle to them: you can’t be satisfied unless you’re perfect, and if true perfection is beyond our reach, then how can you ever be satisfied? Thus, perfectionism is ultimately joyless. To celebrate success would be to imply that they have reached a final plateau of satisfaction, a plateau of perfection. Since such a place cannot exist with finality, and since the perfectionist cannot stop striving until all things are perfect, stopping to celebrate would be an imperfect act. But hey, nobody’s perfect.

Putting Principle 8 into Practice

• What things are you most perfectionistic about? How does your perfectionism serve you? How does it hurt you?
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• How do you view mistakes? How might this view impact how you feel about your current risk?
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• Have you ever been accused of being “in denial”? What shortcomings do you have a hard time accepting about yourself? Why? What would you have to do to assimilate these imperfections instead of rejecting them?
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• What about you is already “perfectly imperfect”? What needs to be?
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• How might your perfectionism be getting in the way of being able to enjoy risk-taking?
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