When is it okay to bring our ‘B-game’ to life?

It was the first time my two-year-old son would be celebrating his birthday in school, and I wanted it to be perfect.

I’d spent weeks looking for a suitable birthday cake – in his favourite colours, visually attractive (read: Instagrammable) and low in sugar – and carefully curated the goodie bags I’d planned for him to give out.

But just days before the party, I realised I’d miscounted the number of goodie bags I needed. I had exactly five days to rustle up an extra goodie bag with exactly the same items as the rest – because how could one be different?

I was in the middle of an exceptionally busy week at work, and this was the last thing I wanted to deal with. Yet I still found myself worrying about that one extra goodie bag.

It struck me then that this seemed to be a recurring pattern in my life. 

Three years ago, I wanted to commemorate the first Christmas in my new home by having the “perfect” Christmas tree. 

I spent hours reading how-tos on decoration, ordering customised wooden ornaments and even, at the end of a long weeknight, dressing the tree, removing everything, and redoing it because I wasn’t quite happy with it. 

Looking back, I wondered: Why did I care so much about it when the whole tree was going to come down in a month anyway? Were the children at my son’s school party really going to care about the contents of a goodie bag that wasn’t even an essential to begin with? 

It’s easy to lose perspective.

The impossible quest for perfection

We have been brought up to celebrate famously talented people who pushed themselves – and perhaps others too – in their quest for perfection.

Renaissance artist Michelangelo reportedly abandoned many of his projects that didn’t meet his impossibly high standards. Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick shot a single scene in his 1980 movie The Shining 148 times to get it just right. In pop culture, Beyonce spent eight months rehearsing for her 2018 Coachella performance, as shown in a Netflix documentary, where she talks about personally selecting each dancer, light and material for the stage.

To some of us, this may sound fairly obsessive. But they reflect what our society values and what we should be striving for: perfection.

In Singapore, where we’ve been raised to believe that how well we score on tests and exams still determines the trajectory of our lives, the message has been drummed into us countless times – that only the best get the best.

This drive to get everything just right, all the time, can take its toll on us. This tendency is getting stronger.

Psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett highlight three different types of perfectionism in their Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale: self-oriented perfectionism, where people put pressure on themselves to perform flawlessly; other-oriented perfectionism, where people expect others to be perfect; and socially prescribed perfectionism, which is the sense that people expect you to be perfect and you need to meet that demand to secure approval.

In an analysis of data from more than 40,000 college students from American, Canadian and British colleges spanning 28 years, researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill found that all three forms of perfectionism have increased over the years.

But socially prescribed perfectionism had increased the most. This is the element of perfectionism, Dr Curran said in a 2018 TED Talk, that has the largest correlation with serious mental illness.

“Socially prescribed perfectionists feel an unrelenting need to meet the expectations of other people. And even if they do meet yesterday’s expectation of perfection, they then raise the bar on themselves to an even higher degree, because they believe that the better they do, the better they’re expected to do,” he said.

“This breeds a profound sense of helplessness, or worse, hopelessness.”

Many of us want to achieve perfection in every aspect of our lives. This may include things that probably aren’t a big deal to begin with, but when we fail to nail them, we beat ourselves up about it.

Can we accept ‘just good enough’?

We might know, in theory, that perfection doesn’t exist – in fact, I’ve probably known this subconsciously for years. Accepting it, however, is another matter altogether.

In the past, with more time and bandwidth on my hands as a childless 20-something, I’d take pride in doing the best I could manage, regardless of how important the task actually was.

I would research copiously to find the right hotel and compulsively compare prices for trips overseas. I would push myself to exercise and put myself through strict diets in a bid to drop a few kilograms. When it came to things like choosing gifts for friends or planning parties, I’d pull out all the stops.

But with age and two young children, my hand has been forced. Unless I want to risk burnout and mental health issues, I have to learn to accept that in some areas, it’s all right to have some imperfection and an outcome that’s, perhaps, “just good enough”.

As the saying goes, it’s perfectly fine to bring your “B-game” in some cases.

But how do we know which areas of our lives we should be comfortable letting go of, and how to decide where our finite time and energy should be focused on?

In the book Curating Your Life: Ending The Struggle For Work-Life Balance, management psychologist and consultant Gail Golden discusses the importance of “curation” – choosing the activities in our lives that are important, meaningful and joyful, and focusing our energy on those.

She also highlights the need to re-evaluate our choices every few years, because things change according to the stage of life we’re in.

So, in following her suggestions, I’m learning to take a step back and consider the underlying intent and motivations behind some of my worries: would my friends actually care if the food at our gathering was ordered from a restaurant instead of home-cooked? Was my need for an Instagrammable birthday cake for my son’s party driven by a need for it to look good on social media, or because I really wanted to make him happy? What’s the worst that could happen if I just chose a reliable chain hotel for our vacation instead of trying to seek out a boutique hidden gem?

Taking a longer-term view also helps: will this matter in a week or a month’s time?

Of course, unlearning years of conditioning isn’t going to happen overnight. But I’ve realised that it starts with small steps – such as letting go of the need for my son’s goodie bags to all match perfectly.

In the end, I filled a spare bag with similar items picked up at the last minute from the bookshop.

It wasn’t perfect. But it was good enough.