What the polishing costs

The costs have come up one at a time. Here they are together, since a bill is easier to judge when it's added up. Most of this chapter is my own reckoning and not research, apart from the places where I name a study.

Time. This is the obvious one and the largest. If you polish for even five hours a week, that's more than two hundred and fifty hours a year. It's six working weeks, spent on differences nobody received. Your own figure may be higher or lower. The exercise at the end of chapter 1 gives you a rough way to estimate it.

Lateness. Work that arrives late is worth less, and sometimes it's worth nothing. Your summary did no good at five to nine on a Thursday.

Things never sent. These were covered in chapter 6. They're the jobs you didn't apply for and the messages that never went, along with the projects you abandoned at ninety per cent.

Things never started. You can't polish what doesn't exist, and the prospect of having to do something perfectly is a strong reason not to begin. Chapter 8 covered the spare room and the piano. The research on procrastination in chapter 6 points the same way.

Exhaustion. Hill and Curran's analysis in chapter 3 found that perfectionistic concerns had a medium to large association with burnout. Burnout means more than tiredness. Researchers describe it as exhaustion together with growing cynicism about the work and a sense of achieving less. It's an odd place for a person to end up when they started out caring so much.

Health. Limburg's analysis of 284 studies found perfectionism associated with depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and eating disorders, as symptoms and as diagnoses. Sarah Egan, Tracey Wade and Roz Shafran have argued on similar evidence that perfectionism is a process that runs across many conditions and helps to keep them going. Association doesn't show cause, and most perfectionists never become ill. But it's one more reason not to treat the habit as a harmless quirk.

Decisions. The same turn of mind affects choices. Barry Schwartz and colleagues studied people they called maximizers, who feel they must find the best option and can't settle for one that's good enough. Across seven samples, maximizers were less happy and less satisfied with life. They were more prone to regret, and they scored higher on perfectionism. In one of the studies they were less pleased with their own purchases than people who'd settled sooner. Looking for the best possible kettle takes an evening, and you end up less pleased with the kettle.

Learning. Skills grow from attempts and feedback. If you produce one polished piece in the time someone else produces four decent ones, they've had four rounds of feedback to your one. Over a few years that compounds. I can't cite a study for this, and I offer it as reasoning. I think it's part of why the professors in chapter 6 did worse. They'd had fewer goes.

The people around you. These were covered in chapter 9. Colleagues stop trying, the family keeps out of your way, and you end up carrying what they've put down.

Enjoyment. This may be the saddest item on the list. Most people with this habit began by loving some kind of work, whether it was writing, cooking, design or making things run well. The polishing turns each piece of it into a test that you might fail. Work that's a test isn't much fun. If you can't remember when you last enjoyed the thing you're good at, that's part of the bill too.

Set against all this is what the polishing buys. It buys a small improvement beyond the line, visible mainly to you. It buys protection against a kind of criticism that rarely comes and can't be fully prevented anyway. It buys a sense of safety that lasts until the next piece of work.

I don't think you'd accept those terms if they were offered to you openly. Nobody offered them. You've paid them an evening at a time, and no single evening seemed like much.