Lowering the Bar Will Not Make You Mediocre

The advice arrives in the same shape every time. Ease off. Let it be good enough. Stop polishing the thing.

And it gets declined, politely, for another decade, because of what it sounds like it is asking for. It sounds like an invitation to become someone who does not mind. Someone whose work is fine. A person with a comfortable relationship to being average.

That inference deserves to be taken seriously before it is taken apart. Anyone who has run on exacting standards for twenty years has correctly noticed that the standards are involved in nearly everything they are proud of. An instruction to lower them reads as a proposal to hand over the good part in exchange for some relief, and nobody sensible accepts that trade.

The proposal is badly worded rather than wrong. What would come down is not what is holding the work up, and that is not a comforting slogan. It is the clearest result to come out of forty years of measuring this.

High standards are not the problem, and the difference is not one of degree

Two arrangements share one word, and the sharing is most of why advice about it bounces off.

High standards are a position on a scale. Somebody minds about the thing, notices what is wrong with it, would rather do it properly. Nothing in the literature argues against that, and a world with less of it would be visibly worse.

Perfectionism is a scale with nothing underneath the bar. The bar itself can sit anywhere. What is missing is the floor. Work that lands slightly short of the mark is worth nothing rather than worth slightly less, there is no band called good enough for anything to be filed under, and so a person whose judgement is genuinely trusted can say it is fine without the sentence landing anywhere.

That last detail is the diagnostic one, and it usually gets filed as insecurity. It is not insecurity. Reassurance fails because the scale has no position for the reassurance to occupy.

The measurement people have their own map of all this, with competing dimension systems going back to 1990 and a long argument about which parts deserve the name at all. The entry on perfectionism holds that history. One finding out of it does the work here.

The two halves do not predict the same things

What forty years of questionnaires produced, more than anything else, is a split. One component is striving: high standards, ambitious targets, caring where the bar sits. The other is concern: fear of mistakes, doubt about whether anything is right, the sense that falling short says something about a person rather than about a draft. They correlate. They are separable, and once separated they stop behaving alike.

Daniel Madigan pooled 37 studies and 8,901 students in 2019 and found striving had a small to medium positive relationship with academic achievement, a correlation of .24, while concern had a small negative one. Andrew Hill and Thomas Curran had already found the reverse pairing for burnout in 2016, across 43 studies and 9,838 people: concern showed medium to large positive relationships with burnout and its symptoms, and striving showed small negative or non-significant ones.

So one half is associated with doing better and not being exhausted. The other half is associated with being exhausted, and with doing slightly worse.

Two things complicate that picture and leaving them out would be the same error in reverse.

The first comes from the workplace. Dana Harari and colleagues pooled the organisational literature in 2018 and found that neither half of perfectionism was significantly related to job performance, while both were related to motivation, engagement and longer hours. Read plainly: at work, the fear is not buying performance, and on that evidence neither is the striving. What the fear reliably buys is the burnout column.

The second is longitudinal. Smith and colleagues tested 67 longitudinal studies and 20,583 people in 2021. Concern and depressive symptoms turned out to feed each other in both directions. Striving also conferred some vulnerability to later depressive symptoms, though the reverse did not hold. Caring intensely where the bar sits is therefore not a free lunch either. What it is not is the engine of the distress.

Nobody expects the next part, which is that less gets finished

Here is where the trade people believe they are making comes apart completely.

Fuschia Sirois and colleagues ran the procrastination literature again in 2017 with perfectionism split into its two halves. Fear of mistakes correlated positively with putting things off, at .23 across 43 samples and roughly 10,000 people. Striving correlated negatively, at minus .22 across 38 samples and 9,544 people. Both relationships held after the shared variance between the two halves was accounted for.

The direction of that second number is the part worth sitting with. High standards are associated with starting earlier. It is the fear that delays, and the fear is the half everybody keeps.

There is a reason this took until 2017 to appear cleanly. Piers Steel's 2007 meta-analysis, which treated perfectionism as one undivided thing, found it unrelated to procrastination at all, which is roughly what happens when two opposite effects are averaged into a single column.

Look at how the delay is actually produced, because from inside none of it looks like delay. Nothing gets started, because there is no visible way to do it well enough yet, and the not-starting reads as preparation. Revision continues past the point where the changes are improvements, and that reads as care. Something that was ready a week ago is still being held, because of one more thing to fix, and that reads as having standards. A thing that could have been done reasonably gets declined rather than done at a level that would be unbearable, and that reads as integrity.

Four kinds of diligence, and the measurable result of all four is fewer things finished, later, with more anxiety attached to each one.

Nothing that was never started appears on any record of what a person has produced.

The bill stays invisible for a structural reason rather than a psychological one. Output is counted. Absence is not.

Twenty years of this can pass without anybody, including the person running it, ever seeing a statement.

Good enough has to be something that can be checked

The usual instruction is to care less, which is useless and also not available. The usable move is narrower and slightly odd: good enough has to stop being a feeling.

As long as it is a feeling, it cannot arrive. The feeling would have to be issued by the same system that is doing the judging, and that system does not issue it. This is why more evidence has never worked, why a decade of good appraisals changes nothing, and why people with genuinely impressive records describe their own work in the register of mild apology.

So the floor goes outside the person, in writing, before the work starts. Three properties and the order matters. Written, so it can be read back by someone who is not in the mood that produced it. Decided in advance, before the thing exists and before there is anything to be anxious about. Time-bound, so that a clock ends it rather than a sense of completion.

That is a change to the scale rather than to the target. The target can stay exactly where it was.

It generalises past work, which is where it is easiest to see. A photograph that is good enough to send to the people who were there. An apology that says the thing and stops. A dinner that feeds six people. None of those require a lower standard, and all of them require a floor.

The rule was learned, and praise teaches it as efficiently as criticism

This usually comes from somewhere, and the somewhere is not mysterious.

Curran and Hill published two meta-analyses in 2022. The first, across 21 studies and more than 7,000 students, found that perceived parental expectations and parental criticism were moderately associated with the self-directed and other-directed forms of perfectionism, and strongly associated with the socially prescribed form, the one that runs on what other people are believed to require. The second pooled 84 studies and 23,975 students between 1989 and 2021 and found expectations, criticism and combined parental pressure all rising over those three decades, with expectations rising fastest. Those samples are American, Canadian and British students, and the trend should not be assumed to be universal.

Now the part that is counter-intuitive and gets left out of most accounts. Harshness is not required. Praise does this job at least as well.

Assor, Roth and Deci asked college students in 2004 about parental regard that arrived conditionally, including the warm version where approval reliably followed achievement. It was associated with a sense of internal compulsion, with self-esteem that moved up and down with performance, with shame and guilt after failure, and with resentment toward the parents. Approval that is contingent teaches contingency. That is the whole lesson, and affection does not soften it.

The experimental version is older and blunter. Mueller and Dweck ran six studies in 1998 in which children were praised for intelligence rather than for effort. Afterwards those children chose easier tasks, enjoyed the work less, and did worse once something went wrong. Being told the result reflects what you are is a complete education in why a result must never be bad.

A child who works out that the marks are the part of them that registers does not conclude that hard work is good. The conclusion is that the standard is what they are worth, and it outlives the room that taught it by decades.

That is an explanation rather than an excuse, and the distinction is practical rather than moral. A personality is hard to shift. A learned rule can be examined by the adult who is still applying it, in rooms where it is no longer true.

What actually comes down

None of this is a diagnosis. Perfectionism is a trait and there is no manual entry to meet, which is also why there is no threshold at which a person becomes entitled to find it a problem.

What there is, for the half worth treating, is trial evidence. Galloway and colleagues reviewed the randomised controlled trials of cognitive behavioural therapy for perfectionism in 2022 and found it reduced perfectionism along with symptoms of anxiety, depression and eating disorders, with no clear difference between face-to-face and internet-delivered versions. The trials are mostly small and the outcomes are mostly self-reported, which is worth knowing before anyone treats that as settled.

The relevant detail is what the treatment aims at. Not the standard. Not ambition, not care, not the part of someone that wants the thing to be right. What gets tested is the prediction: that falling short will mean what it has always seemed to mean. The prediction is usually specific, usually wrong, and the only way to find out is to have let something go out at the line rather than at the feeling.

Three things sit next to this and get confused with it constantly. One is the gap between how much anxiety is running and how little of it shows. One is the attribution of credit for work that went well. One is the ordering of other people's needs ahead of one's own. All four co-occur, which is ordinary, and none of them responds to the handling that suits another, which is why taking the specifics of what actually happens beats taking the label.

What comes down, in the end, is not the bar. It is the claim that everything beneath it is worthless, and that claim was never load-bearing. The scale with the floor on it is the one that produces work for forty years without sending an invoice.

Sources

• Madigan, D. J. (2019). A meta-analysis of perfectionism and academic achievement. Educational Psychology Review, 31.
• Hill, A. P., Curran, T. (2016). Multidimensional perfectionism and burnout: a meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(3).
• Harari, D., Swider, B. W., Steed, L. B., Breidenthal, A. P. (2018). Is perfect good? A meta-analysis of perfectionism in the workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(10).
• Smith, M. M., Sherry, S. B., Ray, C., Hewitt, P. L., Flett, G. L. (2021). Is perfectionism a vulnerability factor for depressive symptoms, a complication of depressive symptoms, or both? A meta-analytic test of 67 longitudinal studies. Clinical Psychology Review, 84.
• Sirois, F. M., Molnar, D. S., Hirsch, J. K. (2017). A meta-analytic and conceptual update on the associations between procrastination and multidimensional perfectionism. European Journal of Personality.
• Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1).
• Curran, T., Hill, A. P. (2022). Young people's perceptions of their parents' expectations and criticism are increasing over time: implications for perfectionism. Psychological Bulletin, 148(1-2).
• Assor, A., Roth, G., Deci, E. L. (2004). The emotional costs of parents' conditional regard: a self-determination theory analysis. Journal of Personality, 72(1).
• Mueller, C. M., Dweck, C. S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1).
• Galloway, R., Watson, H., Greene, D., Shafran, R., Egan, S. J. (2022). The efficacy of randomised controlled trials of cognitive behaviour therapy for perfectionism: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 51(2).