I used to believe correctness was a moral stance. I thought careful, cautious, and painstaking were synonyms for virtue. Then I watched the people who did everything the right way crash harder and longer than anyone else I knew. The routines, the checklists, the rituals that look like discipline from the outside sometimes function like a slow leak on the inside. This essay is part warning part confession and part small act of rebellion against the myth that more correctness equals better results.
The quiet tyranny of flawless choices
Doing everything the right way creates a peculiar fog. It narrows your attention to process and away from consequence. You can spend an entire week polishing an email to death and still miss the meeting that would have turned the email into something useful. That tension is not merely annoying. It accumulates as stress and then becomes a filter that shapes what you attempt, how you risk, and whether you finish anything at all.
How precision hijacks time
Time is the first casualty. The more you insist on doing things perfectly the more tasks expand to fill the hours available. Tasks that could be completed in two hours take six. You convince yourself each extra pass will produce a better outcome. Sometimes it does. Often it just produces more anxiety and a thicker report to shove into a drawer.
There is a structural problem here. Many systems reward error avoidance more visibly than experimentation. Promotions, peer praise, and social media all prefer the finished polished artifact to the messy trial. So people learn to protect themselves by overpreparing. That protective behavior is rational in small doses. It becomes maladaptive when it replaces strategy.
Perfectionism masquerades as care
I have watched managers praise team members for doing things ‘the right way’ while ignoring the cost. The praised employee misses sleep, declines social invites, and begins to micro-manage. The organization gets a compliant worker who completes tasks but stops contributing ideas. The right way becomes the only way, and variety dwindles.
Perfectionism is anxiety. It is not about our work. It is about us and our inherent value. Morra Aarons Mele host of The Anxious Achiever and author.
That quote is blunt and important because it redirects the problem away from merely tactical fixes and toward identity. When correctness becomes identity people protect it at enormous cost. They cease to separate self worth from outcome. That is the moment stress stops being occasional and becomes a background hum.
The paradox of better outcomes that feel worse
Here is an uncomfortable truth: sometimes the most correct path yields an objectively better result and subjectively worse life. A surgeon may do every step exactly and still burn out. An employee may file perfect reports and be promoted into isolation. Success, in other words, can come with a tax deducted from joy. We rarely account for that tax when we design work cultures or personal habits.
When rules become prisons
Ritual and routine are tools. If you find yourself prefacing every decision with a checklist recitation you have crossed from disciplined into defensive. Rules help scale decisions but they also calcify possibilities. The more rules you add to guarantee correctness the fewer paths remain for serendipity, improvisation, and creative risk.
There’s a difference between being accountable and being obsessed with accountability. The first admits trade offs. The second refuses any trade off and so becomes brittle.
This often comes at great cost to the self and relationships Carla Marie Manly Ph D clinical psychologist and author.
She points to a frequently ignored casualty of relentless correctness relationships. When you require everything to be right you also require others to be right. That standard isolates you because few people can match that pace indefinitely. Intimacy, collaboration, and trust are built on small permissible mistakes. Remove those and you remove the scaffolding that holds teams and friendships together.
Why stress increases even when the output improves
Stress here is not just mental. It is operational. Correctness increases cognitive load. You run more checks, cross reference more sources, and keep more mental tabs. That overhead reduces bandwidth for strategic thinking. So you become efficient at producing error free outputs while losing the capacity to ask whether those outputs matter.
In practice this looks like more polished deliverables that no one reads, meetings that are impeccably documented but achieve nothing, and a portfolio of neat failures. You have succeeded at being right and failed at moving forward.
When trying harder is the wrong variable
Most people assume the answer is to try harder or to optimize the system. But iteration without humility compounds the mistake. Try harder only makes sense when your metric aligns with the outcome you value. If you measure correctness and care about speed or creativity you will be conflicted. The sane move is to adjust metrics not to double down on effort.
Practical stubbornness and permission to be messy
Accepting that correct is not always best is partly intellectual and partly emotional. You must permit yourself to be messy occasionally. But permission alone is limp unless you redesign incentives. If your calendar, your boss, and your inner critic all demand flawlessness you need a tactical escape hatch.
One practical step is to institutionalize deliberate imperfection: schedule a visible prototype that is explicitly labeled as work in progress. Make it public, invite feedback, and treat it as an experiment. That removes the shame around imperfection and converts it into data. It sounds simple because it is. It also hurts because it feels unsafe at first.
Trust the edge not the center
Here is a softer position I hold: correctness should be parked at the center of what matters. Safety systems, life critical protocols, and legal compliance deserve exactitude. Peripheral choices should live at the edge where leanness and iteration rule. When you learn to allocate perfectionary energy discriminately you conserve psychological resources and reduce stress dramatically.
That allocation requires discernment and a willingness to break your own habits. Neither is painless nor quick. But both produce lives where correctness is a tool rather than a tether.
Parting observation that is intentionally unfinished
I will not tell you how to reconcile your impulse to be right with the messiness of being human. Some elements require therapy or a new workplace; others require small stubborn experiments on your calendar. What I will say is this: if your rightness is costing you joy or the capacity to start anything, then it is a problem even when the results look impressive.
There is no clean formula here. That is the point. Life is not a process audit. Sometimes the healthiest move is to produce something shoddy and see what happens.
Summary table
| Problem | Why it matters | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Time inflation due to overpolishing | Deadlines slip and momentum dies | Set strict timeboxes and ship drafts |
| Identity wrapped around correctness | Failure feels like personal collapse | Separate self worth from output through reflection |
| Rules that block creativity | Innovation and serendipity decline | Move peripheral choices to prototype mode |
| Relational strain | Loneliness and depersonalization | Allow visible mistakes and normalize repair |
FAQ
Is doing things the right way always bad?
No. Doing things correctly matters in many contexts and is often essential. The argument here is not about abandoning standards. It is about recognizing when correctness is producing diminishing returns or causing harm. Keep the standards that protect safety and reliability. Loosen the ones that produce anxiety without meaningful upside.
How do I know which tasks deserve perfection?
Look for tasks with asymmetric consequences. If a mistake might cause physical harm legal exposure or catastrophic financial loss invest the effort. If the task is reversible or informational and the cost of error is low try a leaner approach. Context matters so use both consequence and reversibility as guiding rules.
Won’t reducing correctness hurt my reputation?
Reputation is an aggregate signal over time. Shipping thoughtful work consistently builds trust more reliably than producing one perfect artifact and then vanishing for weeks. Communicate intent when you choose to release prototypes. People are more forgiving when they understand you are iterating rather than sloppily failing to care.
What if my workplace punishes imperfection?
Then the change required is systemic not personal. Small experiments like shared prototypes can demonstrate value. If the culture is rigid you may need allies to shift incentives. In the meantime control what you can: manage your calendar protect deep work and negotiate realistic expectations with concrete deadlines.
Can therapy help if I tie identity to correctness?
Yes many people find therapy useful to explore the origins of perfectionist tendencies and to learn new habits. Therapy helps if the drive to be right produces significant anxiety or impairs relationships. It is one of several tools including coaching mentorship and practical habit design that can reduce the harmful effects of perfectionism.
Is this a call to lower standards?
No. It is a call to be strategic about standards. The goal is not mediocrity but sustainable excellence. That requires thinking about where correctness adds value and where it functions as a stress multiplier. Choose the battles that matter and allow the rest to breathe.
