Brief: Perfectionism and Fractals

Perfectionism and Fractals

Do you know fractals?
Fractals are constructions that contain the property that when you try to gather information about a certain attribute of this constructions you will find out that every time you take a closer look you will find even more information about this attribute. In the end this means the amount of information about this attribute are infinite.

What has this to do with perfectionism?
Besides the psychological reasons that lead to behaviour of perfectionism, the perfectionism itself can be expressed as an endless spiral of repetition of the same task just on different levels of detail.

The following example shall explain the association:
If you are asked to cut wood planks into a length of 61cm per piece you could now take your tools and cut each piece so that none is 62cm or 60cm long but 61cm. Sounds fine, right? A perfectionist would say “No!”. He isn’t thinking on the coarse detail level of 1cm. His assumption is that he was asked for exactly 61cm per piece. This means 60.9cm or 61.1cm is not good enough! And because his assumption is that it needs to be exactly 61cm with an infinite numbers of zeros after the comma, he ends up in the concept of fractals, because there will always be a deviation from exact 61cm, it just depends on the level of detail.

Other examples, tasks or questions, that can lead the perfectionist to the fractal behaviour and make them want to cry are:

• Clean your room.
• Weed the garden.
• Cut the onions.
• How are you?
• Do you love me?
• How much do you love me?

If you want to help your perfectionist friends give them a reference so that they know what level of detail you expect. Give concrete examples, don’t stay vague. Provide a context for what you need the result. If the perfectionist knows that the wood planks will be used as firewood and not for construction of a wooden hut it changes automatically his awareness so that he knows how not to fail your expectations.

A perfectionist has an incredible fear of failing. So tell him what is good enough for you and why it is good enough. Provide him comfort so that he knows that he can’t fail if he follows your level of expectation and detail.

“Brief” posts are much shorter posts and don’t try to explain every thought but try to paint a picture.
They are statements and open questions to the reader and not discussions.
“Brief” is the German word for “letter” and English word for “short”. If you speak it out loud, you realise it sound phonetically identical to “breathe”. So, take these “Brief” posts as something to consume, reflect and relax. As a distraction from your daily life.

Image of “Koch snowflake” is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake#/media/File:KochFlake.svg it has the following license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Only thing that has been changed for this image is to set a white background.