Perfectionism Doesn’t Make Perfect
***Spoilers for Glow Up follow.***
Even before ALL THIS, I’ve found a lot of comfort in British reality competition shows. It’s just so soothing when the producers don’t actively try to make the contestants cry. They get stressed out and all worked up, but they’re not being subjected to psychological torture.
Which is why I’ve just finished season one of Glow Up on Netflix. It’s a reality competition for makeup artists, or MUAs as they call them. (A quick Google tells me that MUA isn’t unique to this show, though come on people, saying “Em You Ays” is only one syllable less than “makeup artists” but whatever.)
I really looked forward to finishing the season because one of the MUAs is an admitted perfectionist and I have thoughts. Nikki’s perfectionism quickly becomes a problem because these challenges have time limits, but she’s used to spending all day on a single look. Which sounds like it’s OK when she’s on her own time, but seriously honey just think of all the things you could do if you only spent 3 hours on a single makeup look.
Nikki seemed to be getting the loser edit again and again. She’d make little progress for an hour as she fussed over blending foundation or whatever, and then rush to finish. This didn’t necessarily result in great work, but it did result in finished work.
Glow Up doesn’t simply have the judges pick who to eliminate each week. The bottom 2 MUAs compete in a final head-to-head challenge where they have to apply the perfect winged eyeliner (or whatever) to one of a pair of identical twins. The time limit is extremely tight, and it’s a high pressure situation.
Again and again, Nikki got sent to the final challenge. And she won every single time. She was the freaking Terminator. She’s amazing under pressure. Because her perfectionism consistently leads to a time crunch, she’s gotten used to performing with the sword of Damocles hanging over her head.
But.
The final head-to-head challenge was to determine the winner. And she lost. Not because of her perfectionism-driven time management issues, but because the lipstick wasn’t perfectly symmetrical. It was fine. It would’ve been perfectly adequate for a magazine photo shoot or runway show.
But we all know that towards the end of any reality competition, the judges are looking for any slight misstep that’ll help them figure out which beloved talented contestant to send home. In the Glow Up final challenges, the judges look at the models’ faces with a magnifying glass, FFS.
Her Instagram account with 824,000 followers makes it clear that she and her career have flourished. A second place finish on one of these shows is nothing to be ashamed of, and can lead to all sorts of professional success. She didn’t win, but she didn’t exactly lose either. I’m not here to shame her.
But I am here to talk about perfectionism and I think it’s interesting to note that the perfectionist didn’t produce something perfect. Which is a knock on perfectionism, not Nikki.
We drive ourselves crazy trying to achieve perfection, but that’s no guarantee we’ll actually do it.
A Useful Trick
You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t already know that perfectionism is not the best use of your energy. You also wouldn’t be here if letting go of perfectionism was as simple as acknowledging that it’s a sucker’s bet.
One of the judges told Nikki that since she’s better under pressure, she should give herself mini time limits. Once she started telling herself that she had only 15 minutes to do the model’s lipstick and so on, she was able to make steady progress and avoided the last minute panic that consistently hurt the quality of her work.
If your perfectionism makes tasks unnecessarily time consuming, try giving yourself mini-deadlines. When time is up, you’re done. This seems counterintuitive because you’re just being strict with yourself in the name of going easy on yourself. But time limits help us throw our inner perfectionist out of the room. Forgetting about perfection for fifteen minutes is great practice for getting rid of it for longer stretches of time.