What the polishing is for

If someone told you to stop polishing, you'd probably feel they were asking you to stop caring. That reaction deserves a proper hearing before I argue with it, because the polishing does give you things.

It gives you the feeling of being conscientious. While you're on the sixth pass you're plainly someone who takes trouble. Most of us were brought up to admire that. "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well" is a saying you probably heard before you could read.

It gives you safety, or the sense of it. Every flaw you remove is one fewer thing that anyone could criticise. If the work is flawless, nobody can say anything. The polishing feels like closing windows before a storm.

It puts off the moment of judgment. While the work is still on your screen it hasn't been judged by anyone. Once it's sent, it's out of your hands. Another pass keeps it in your hands for one more evening.

It protects an identity. You may have been the careful one since school, the child whose homework was neat, the colleague whose slides never have errors. People have praised you for it for years. It's reasonable to fear that without the extra passes you'd be someone else, and someone less.

And now and then it pays. Once in a while the seventh pass does catch a real mistake, a wrong figure or a name misspelt. You remember those catches vividly. They seem to justify all the passes that caught nothing.

Underneath these are needs nobody should be ashamed of. You want to do good work. You want to be safe from criticism, or at least from unfair criticism. You want to be respected, and to go on being the person you've taken pride in being. The question for the next several chapters is whether the polishing meets those needs, and what it charges you for them.

One more thing belongs here, and I find it a comfort. You didn't invent this. Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill gathered 164 samples of American, Canadian and British college students who had filled in the same perfectionism questionnaire between 1989 and 2016. There were 41,641 students in all. Average scores rose steadily over those twenty-seven years on all three parts of the questionnaire. Students increasingly felt that others demanded perfection of them. They demanded more of other people, and they demanded more of themselves. The biggest rise was in the first of those, the sense that other people expect you to be perfect.

The study covers students only, and two commentaries were published beside it, so it isn't the last word. Curran and Hill's own explanation is cultural. They point to a more competitive and individualistic climate in those three countries since the 1980s. That part is their interpretation and can't be tested by a questionnaire trend. But the trend itself tells you something useful. If perfectionism were simply your temperament, there'd be no reason for it to rise across a whole generation. Something in how people are raised, schooled and graded is teaching it. What's been learned can be examined, and some of it can be put down.

I can't tell you where you learned it, but some routes are common, and this is my own observation. Many people with this habit were praised as children for results and seldom for effort. The neat homework got a gold star, and the messy attempt at something hard got nothing. Some grew up with a parent who noticed the one B among the As. Some found early on that being faultless was a way to stay out of trouble in a house where trouble came easily. Exams teach it too, since they take marks off for every mistake and offer none for finishing early or for knowing when to stop. Every one of those lessons made sense where you learned it. You've gone on applying them in places where nobody is marking.