The American actor Mandy Patinkin has a reputation as a “self-oriented” perfectionist. He’s one of those who impose exacting standards on themselves and engage in rigorous self-evaluation.
In this interview for The New Yorker, Patinkin reveals how he overcame this tendency:
My children watched me be too hard on myself for years. They’d come to performances, concerts. Then they’d hear their father criticizing it afterwards. One day, my son Gideon and I are walking down the street on the Upper West Side and he wants to talk about his life. He’s talking about bad nights, good nights, et cetera. And he says, “I watched you suffer for so many years over things that I could never understand what you were suffering about, because I was there and I saw it and it was great. I watched you suffering, and I learned that it was meaningless, that it had no worth, it was for nothing.” And I started to weep. My sons knew that it was never worth it.
Idea for Impact: If you tend to fixate on undue self-standards, ask yourself, “To what end?” Recalibrate your expectations. Don’t let your perfectionist tendencies hold you back.