Quotes About Perfectionism

Someone will say, 'Well, that's good enough.' As soon as I hear 'Good enough,' it really bothers me. I spend as much time as I think I can on anything I do. I try to do that with the people that work with me. I try to get the best out of them.

I may be a successful football player, but I feel like such a failure.

When I direct and have to look at filmed scenes of myself, I suck.

Basically, in our society, you can never fix anything enough. The minute you get your head above water about one thing, they let you know that 12 other things about you suck. It's like playing 'Self-Esteem Whack-A-Mole.'

One of the big songwriting things for me has always been: always think what you do sucks. Because the second you stop believing that, you suck. And that's a fact.

I've struggled a lot in my life with feeling like a failure. I lived in a 'prison of perfectionism,' holding myself to a standard I couldn't possibly live up to. Then I became a mom, and all of a sudden, there arose even more opportunities for failure.

Even though I'm in the industry and I act and all this stuff, I still suffer from self-esteem issues... from the way that I look or the way that I talk... just nitpicking at myself.

Asking myself, 'Is this any good?' is pointless. It just slows down my writing, and I can't tell anyway. It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

I love a good suit, and when I see photographs of myself in a jacket that doesn't fit me quite right or the sleeves are too long, it drives me insane.

I travel a lot. If you look at my suitcase, everything is extremely well-packed and well-folded; people who travel with me are impressed at how organized I am. Some would refer to me as a maniac for this.

When I listen to my own records, I always think, 'Oh, I could have sung that so much better.' But you have to finish something and turn it in. If I didn't have folks who say, 'Come on, we need the record now,' I probably would never finish one.

Obstruction can be caused by so many factors - perfectionism, distraction, faltering confidence, external demands and pressures. At some point, of course, you've got to push through it all if you're to write, and if you don't, or can't, you're sunk.

I think a lot of people think it's easy to just post stuff. They think it's the easy way to fame nowadays, but it's been hard. You have to film the video, which takes forever because I'm super picky about all my takes and stuff. Then you have to edit it and upload it, and doing that three times a week is very, very difficult.

I'm super OCD, so everything is clean.

I remain very aware of my failures and often run them obsessively through my mind, which is a failure in and of itself.

All these things we do bespeak a terrible anxiety: that our children simply will not be able to make it through life if we do not perform totemic acts to keep them on the path toward self-perfection and keep their lives pure and unfettered by distracting emotion, personality foibles, or less-than-ideal experiences.

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

La autoobservación es uno de los procesos mentales más importantes para el crecimiento humano, pero si nos excedemos en su uso, colocándolo al servicio de esquemas obsesivos y/o perfeccionistas93, la enfermedad psicológica puede prosperar fácilmente.

No debo permitirme ninguna falla, si quiero triunfar. El más mínimo error debe ser drásticamente sancionado y removido". Autocastigo en estado puro: no sólo te vuelves perfeccionista de tu propio ser, sino que te azotas

I have very high expectations of myself. I'm a very competitive person but competitive with myself. I want to be the best that I can be and if that means that I'm eventually better than everyone else then so be it.

Perfectionism is not a prerequisite for anything but pain.

The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life." -Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Skip perfection. A lame drawing is better than no drawing.