Perfectionism is All Lies and Oversimplifications, Part One Million

This tweet has it all, from a perfectionist standpoint: It: Sets an impossibly high standard for success. (You should be as successful as Apple's Steve Jobs, etc.) Is shaming. ("What's your excuse?") Makes specious comparisons. (Between you and these ultra-successful outliers, most of whom also achieved their success decades ago, in a very different society and economy.) Offers zero guidance on how to actually achieve the level of super success it's promoting. AND IT'S WRONG. Perfectionist narratives, including the "rags to riches" and "bootstrap" ones so beloved by the business press and conservatives in general, are inevitably oversimplified and dramatic. As you can read in's brilliant takedown of the tweet, the founders of the companies mentioned were overwhelmingly rich and well-connected. And, with one exception, Mattel's Ruth Handler, they were/are all white men, so the tweet's implied claim that, "anyone can do this" is, on its face, bogus. The perfectionist tweet … [Read more...]