Being a perfectionist can be quite stressful; it makes you overthink and lose sleep in order to get things done your way. Being a perfectionist in Egypt is a completely different story since it might be the least perfectionist-friendly environment you can be in. Ninety percent of the population doesn’t do their jobs right, or doesn’t do it at all. The majority tends to find the easiest way to get it over with irrespective of the quality of the outcome.
If you have an extremely sharp eye for details, if you spend huge amounts of time, right down to the last moment, to perfect something, if you over analyze outcomes when they don’t turn out as expected and wonder why it wasn’t a different outcome, and whether you could have done anything to prevent that, then here are some problems you might face here in Egypt…
Too Much Pressure
Perfectionism is a process that aims to reach a perfect outcome, whether it’s a project, a product, or even a simple task. Achieving this perfect outcome requires a certain set of conditions that a perfectionist has in mind in order to complete the task. These conditions can be the quality of the components that will create his product, the performance of the people who work with him on the task, or even little things like transportation. Here in Egypt NOTHING EVER goes right. If you didn’t get things done yourself, you can never trust its quality. There will always be incompetent team members or conditions that slow down your progress. This case of imperfect conditions exerts a lot of stress and pressure on the perfectionist making him constantly nervous, depressed, suffering from damaged self-esteem, mood disorders and even eating disorders.
Procrastination
Surprisingly, procrastination is a very common result to perfectionism, especially here in Egypt. As a result of us wanting to do a certain task in the most perfect way, we sometimes tend to wait for the perfect time to do it. We don’t want to be distracted or interrupted; we don’t want to be busy doing something else. We want to be exclusively focused so we keep procrastinating, waiting for the perfect time until sometimes it’s too late.
Productivity
As it is well known in almost every aspect of life, there is a curve between effort and productivity that is as follows:
This demonstrates the fact that 80% of the productivity comes from 20% – 30% of the effort; the other 20% of the work comes from 70% – 80% of the effort and time. Being perfectionists always makes us feel the urge to get every task 100% done, which leads us to spending so much time on little and minor things that do not affect the bigger picture at all. This results in us accomplishing less tasks, the thing that affects our productivity so much.
Mental and Physical Health and Well-being
Finally, mental and physical illness can be a result of extreme perfectionism. When we sacrifice our eating and sleeping, when we become stressed most of the time and always have a low self-esteem and underestimate our self-worth because we never get things done the way we imagine it, when we always fight with team mates because they don’t perform their jobs up to our expectations, when this is our daily routine, we surely collapse and become weaker by the day. This is why we should definitely reconsider matters the moment we feel that perfectionism is taking over our lives. We must accept failure and imperfection, otherwise we will never be able to enjoy anything we do in life.
