On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In his recent release, Hidden Potential, organizational psychologist and best-selling author Adam Grant shares the character skills and motivational structures that can help people realize their potential. Here’s a thought-provoking excerpt:

In their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.

If perfectionism were a medication, the label would alert us to common side effects. Warning: may cause stunted growth. Perfectionism traps us in a spiral of tunnel vision and error avoidance: it prevents us from seeing larger problems and limits us to mastering increasingly narrow skills.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a perfectionist, you’ve probably experienced those tendencies on tasks that are important to you. On the projects that matter deeply to us, we’ve all felt the urge to keep revising and refining until it’s exactly right. But traveling great distances depends on recognizing that perfection is a mirage—and learning to tolerate the right imperfections.

Source: Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, pp. 67-68