The Perfectionism Trap
You have been fed with many success stories you don't know how to accept your own failure.
As a child, I liked to open things just to see how they functioned and I hated to leave things opened too. So, if I saw a radio that was making bad sounds, I wouldn’t be comfortable until I had opened it, fixed it, and closed it. I also liked to experiment with things a lot; I always wanted to see what the result would be if x thing were to happen.
My father immediately presumed I wanted to be an engineer or doctor. So he slowly fed me with stories of outliers in medicine and engineering. I was a weirdly quiet child. I still am; I am either totally, nervously silent, or I talk non-stop. Both my parents thought maybe Lawyering was the path for me. For this; my father had a relatively successful lawyer friend whom he never failed to drop his credentials on my lap.
But my sights were set on something different entirely; I enjoyed the news and the people who made them. I loved literature and the people who crafted them. And I always thought my place was in the media. I saw the shiny people, the great people, the ones whom we will continue to write about for decades, and I was attracted to success. But I soon learned something. It was ugly, very very ugly.
The majority we do not see
One of the privileges I enjoyed very early in life was to mix with the very wealthy and the very poor. In a lot of ways, it put my life in perspective and shaped my sense of being. I also met highly talented people and well, ‘simple-minded’ people.
As I grew older, I saw rich people fall off as time buried their names. I would occasionally remember someone’s name and ask my father about them and he would struggle to give a coherent response on what happened to them. I have seen very talented people seemingly disappear.
In 2013, I discovered a book at the Kwara state library; Dr Faustus. It stirred something in me.
It is almost impossible for us to discuss literature today and not mention Williams Shakespeare but many people do not know Dr Faustus, a play written by one of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. Shakespeare and Marlowe were born about the same time and were baptised in the same year. Although Shakespeare lived longer than Marlowe, both were revered writers in their time.
Over the years, writers have aspired to create masterpieces as Shakespeare did. But very few people talk about the genius of Marlowe; because very few people know about it. So I started asking myself; how many other people attempted to be just as great but were swallowed by the crushing defeat of not being able to win like one’s contemporaries?
We hear about the success of outliers like Leonardo Da Vinci but we hear very little about their contemporaries who fell off and did not make it full circle. Did you know that Giacomo Casanova (yes, the womaniser!) was in fact a polymath, contemporary of people like Goethe, Mozart, and Voltaire, yet his success in art was nothing compared to that of his peers.
And at the bottom of even these known relative successes, there are tons of people who nobody remembers. People who failed so thoroughly, you might think they were cursed. People who have the creativity of Apollo yet could not write a single line of poetry to global acclaim. What we are constantly fed are stories of successes. The rags to riches, grass to grace; these fill us with hope, confidence, that if we played our cards right, we shall be rewarded with successes that will echo for centuries. And this is why many of us struggle(d) to deal with failures when they happen. Because in our idea of becoming prodigies, nobody warns us about failing.
The perfectionism trap
The school of life wrote brilliantly of the topic thus: “we typically aim for a particular career because we have been deeply impressed by the exploits of the most accomplished practitioners in the field. We formulate our ambitions by admiring the beautiful structures of the architect tasked with designing the city’s new airport, or by following the intrepid trades of the wealthiest Wall Street fund manager, by reading the analyses of the acclaimed literary novelist or sampling the piquant meals in the restaurant of a prize-winning chef. We form our career plans on the basis of perfection.”
One time I looked at the number of people who have graduated from the Nigerian Law School over the years, and there were at least 70,000 of them. How many prominent lawyers can you mention off the top of your head? How many people who graduated last year will be successful?
What about entrepreneurship? We all hear about outliers every now and then. Do you know how many Flutterwave we never hear about that were buried under?
In our collective disbelief; that failure is something that could happen to us, no matter how hard we work, we often do not know how to deal with failure when we face them. We have lived all our lives on the fragile half-truth that hard work will always pay. But that is far from what reality gives.
We fall so deeply into the perfectionism trap that it feeds a cost-sunk fallacy effect in our lives, causing us to keep pushing and pushing, instead of giving up and trying out other endeavours. In a lot of ways, we refuse to be comfortable with failure in the way we are excited about success.
While it is impossible to diagnose what led to several falling off of seemingly talented people, what we must constantly remind ourselves of is that failure is not new. Failure is not a distant dystopia that can happen to everyone except us. Failure can always happen to you. And not in an I-made-a-mistake-that-I-can-fix type of way. We can fail in more ways than we can possibly imagine. We can fail so hard that our existence will be forgotten; sometimes in deliberate forgetfulness of our failure, sometimes because we are a society that thrives on the shiny and not on the dull.
Failure can happen to you. If it does, accept it. Don’t fight it. If you are able to restart in the same field, please do. If you are unable to, seek the simplest type of living possible and save yourself however you can. But do not live without failure as a possibility.
TEA
I have not had a lengthy NAN in quite a while and somehow this feels so refreshing. It is a reminder that I needed for myself and one which I thought you would like too. Consider watching this for its audio-visual merits:
As an extension of today’s NAN, I believe this is a thread everyone should read:
In the coming days (or weeks), I want to attempt a new thing and I hope it works out. And even if it doesn’t, well, I tried. For now, please engage this tweet; share with people who speak Yoruba, and if you do speak, kindly fill the attached form:
If you notice(d) that there are no illustrations this week, well, it is because I was deeply immersed in a lot of other things I forgot to reach out to Sef to discuss the week’s illustrations. They will return next week. Edit: Sef sent me illustrations and the web version has been updated. That man is an impossible wunderkind.
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Be nice to other people, smile as much as you can, and live freely. Have a great week.
I didn't only enjoy this, I felt it. whenever I read an article that feels like it's telling my story, I have a different feeling that's ineffable deep down. I can relate to almost everything, even the Dr Faustus book (I still have a copy) Well done princely, this is great. this is superb. Thank you, I now have new things added to my bank of words on talking about failure.
I enjoyed reading this. Thanks!