Sure, success is sweet. But failure is more intimately revealing of what it means to be human, writes thom_curran
is a professor of psychology at the London School of Economics and author of a landmark study that the BBC hailed as “the first to compare perfectionism across generations.” His research has been featured in media ranging from themagine a world without failure. A republic of success, where our entire existence consists of one, long, never ending victory lap. Would it be enlivening? Or would it lack something essential? Sports fans know the answers to those questions in their bones.
Seeing this unfold is agonizing for the exhausted competitors. They grimace with raw hurt. They gallantly try to stay on the coattails of the now runaway leader, knowing, in their heart if not their legs, that the race is already over. One hundred meters to go, hands littered with blisters, calves cramping with excess lactate, they must sit down on their saddles and watch in resignation as the elated victor crosses the finish line to raucous applause.
Psychologist Andy Hill and I spearhead much of this research. And to get the maximum effect, we harness the anguish of sports. In one, we set up a cycling sprint challenge and invited volunteer cyclists to race in fours against each other. After they’d raced, no matter where they finished, we told them that they’d come last.
He then told them to have another go, and that’s when something astonishing happened. The cyclists who scored low on perfectionism said the effort they put in on the second trial did not change. If anything, they worked slightly harder. The cyclists who scored high on perfectionism, however, did the opposite. They stopped trying. On the second attempt, after the first failure, their effort fell off a cliff.
Procrastination is often talked about as a time-management problem. But as psychologist Fuchsia Sirois, for the perfectionist, it’s an anxiety-management problem. Her research shows that rather than tackling difficult tasks head-on, perfectionistic people dither, check social media, go internet hopping, or cook up the latest TikTok recipe.
We’ve got to be extremely wary of this selection effect. Because when the only people television shows, podcasts, blue tick accounts, and YouTube channels care about – and learn from – are the winners then we’ll invariably see perfectionism in high performance when. Survivor bias has duped many high-profile pundits, coaches, celebrities, researchers and psychologists. And it’s also duped us—as a society—into putting perfectionism on a gilded pedestal and calling it our favourite flaw.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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