[IfOnlyYouKnew]

I find this now commonly believed and endlessly repeated idea that procrastination is primarily due to perfectionism... maybe a little too convenient?

As in: it's almost like those jokes about interview answers: "What's your biggest weakness" / "I work too much".

It it helps people to cope and build some self-confidence then, maybe, it's the mistake that is net-positive. Sort-of like the (apocryphal) story that Columbus made a mistake and believed India to be much closer to Europe, and wouldn't have attempted to cross the Atlantic otherwise.

But my default position would be that any such delusional thought patterns tend to hurt. This, specifically, also has the ugly implication that anybody getting stuff done is sloppy and/or otherwise not at the genius level it takes to never do anything right.

(Spoken as someone who should be working instead of arguing on HN)

[jamestimmins]

I think it's only too convenient if you view perfectionism as people wanting to do great work or nothing. In reality, I experience it more as "unless I can make this work perfectly, it's gonna be crap so it isn't worth it." So it's less procrastination, and more paralysis.

[eyelidlessness]

Completely independent of my comment about ADHD... whatever fictions we need to tell ourselves to function well are only damaging if they mask or enable other dysfunction. If people thrive by believing there’s a god or a magnetic force or lucky numbers, it only hurts if there’s some other harm done. I know we nerds like to focus on metrics and evidence. But the evidence is mixed on self deception.

[Fumtumi]

I see it the other way around: I should do something (for whatever external reason), i can't and now my brain wants to know why.

Thinking through it and telling you that its not worth it because x makes it better to fit my worldview. But it just might not be relevant at all this part of thinking.

For example: I do like learning but i was sitting in school (with >20) and understood the math teacher, after that we should do exercises. I was blocked. Couldn't do it. I was mentally aware of this block. I started talking ritalin. The block was gone.

I realize this block more often and think more about this blockage than calling it perfectionism or realism.

Another example: I started studing after that and realized quite soon that its fun to read through it and learn things and it feels totally broken how much time you have to invest of sometimes finding good explanation for things. And more complex it got, the chance that i started to forget those things after the exam were high. Knowing how aes works step by step vs. having a rough idea. I always can read quickly through wikipedia to remember enough about aes. I wouldn't needed to study for this.

And the balance was very weird. There were clearly lectures which i was able to do by reading and learning for a week before the exam (i already worked professionally at that time so i had experience) which provided very small peaces of insight vs. math lectures which were interesting to hear, frankly useless to learn due to me never needing it in the future and my studies not getting deep enough so those lectures would have mattered.

What matters is bringing home money which means in the first instance a job is critical. I would love to see who i would become and what i would do and how a live would look like if i wouldn't need to work and still have enough resources available. Or if my job would actually matter.

[birdsbirdsbirds]

>the genius level it takes to never do anything right

A Freudian slip?

Perfectionism is a deeper curse than procrastination. Procrastination can just be laziness, but like Alcoholism, if you cannot stop it, then you have a problem, and then it could be perfectionism.

Perfectionism is not perfection, like Socialism is not social.