Stop Trying to be Perfect

Introduction to Problem

0:00You may be under the illusion that it's a good idea to look in the mirror and say, you're perfect just the way you are. That's a problem. If you can't change to be better because you're as good as you could possibly be, you're perfect right now, then the conclusion that the world is all screwed up and tilted against you is going to create a whole lot of bitterness and resentment and helplessness. So we face a dilemma, don't we? We want to feel better and make other people feel better, but people's tendency to do so through self-enhancement and self-esteem boosting

0:32is a short-lived solution with possibly high and enduring ultimate costs. The truth of the matter is you're not perfect and neither am I, and that's incredibly good news.

Welcome to Office Hours

0:50Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness, about how you can have more of both. But just as importantly, how you can become somebody who brings more of these to people that you love, to everybody, as a matter of fact. One of the things that I try to bring up in the show again and again is the fact that when you become a teacher of happiness, that's how you become a happier person on an ongoing and sustained basis. The secret of happiness is learning the science, I believe,

1:21but also changing your habits and teaching those ideas to other people. And that's really what the show is all about. One of the reasons that I have this show is because I'm dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love as a scientist. That's what I'm dedicated to my life doing, and I'd love to have you in the movement with me. So thank you for watching the show. If you're a long-time viewer, I appreciate it. If you're a first-time viewer, I hope you enjoy it. In either case, please do share.

1:51If you have any ideas about future shows, you have any ideas or criticisms or corrections, please let us know. Office hours at arthurbrooks.com. And don't forget to leave a review and comments on Spotify or Apple or wherever you're watching this show. Also, while you're at it, please do order a copy of my new book, The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, which, thanks to you, is the number one New York Times bestseller. I appreciate that. And pick up a second copy for somebody who's looking for the meaning in their life,

2:21which, by the way, is everybody. So anyway, thanks to all of you for making the book a success and for making this show a success. It's spreading more every week. We have more listeners and viewers every week than we had in the last. Hi, friends. I'm Arthur Brooks. And I'm Esther Brooks. Hello.

Couples Retreat Announcement

2:37If you're married and you and your partner are looking for ways to deepen your relationship, Esther and I have something exciting to share with you. This June, at the Modern Elder Academy's beautiful ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Esther and I will be leading a three-day in-person retreat for couples. It's called The Meaning of Us. My recent work on the science and ancient wisdom of meaning has led me to think more and more about romantic relationships and how they're a unique source of meaning in life. Most couples never stop to ask each other the big questions.

3:12Why? Because ordinary life always gets in the way. And it happens to us, too. But there's another problem that I see today. Many hardworking spouses, strivers, fall into a familiar pattern. They try to earn love in the same way they earn the world's rewards. But love can't be earned. It's a gift freely given. But that's a mysterious idea that we'll unpack together with you. This is not a couples therapy. Nope. No, no, no, no. This is for couples who are good together, but who want to grow deeper.

3:46But most importantly, you will live with a concrete vision for your next chapter. This vision will be rooted in your own values. This is the only time we're doing this together this year. So if you want to take your marriage even deeper, come join us this June in Santa Fe. We'd love to work with you. Come on.

The Self-Esteem Movement

4:09Today I want to talk about a trend in our society that I think is deeply mistaken, and it may be hurting you, even though you don't know it. You may be under the illusion that it's a good idea to look in the mirror and say, you're perfect just the way you are. This is kind of a central tenet of the self-esteem movement. Or you might think it's a good idea to tell your kid, you're perfect just the way you are. That's a problem. That's what I want to talk about today. The truth of the matter is, you're not perfect, and neither am I.

4:41And that's incredibly good news. I'm going to give you some relief today in your imperfection and give you permission to start making progress in your life that will bring you tremendous happiness. Today's theme, you're not perfect. When you tell somebody or you are told that you're perfect just the way that you are, which, by the way, we hear this constantly. You probably heard this in elementary school. You hear this in kind of internet memes. You've seen this as kind of this bumper sticker psychology that everybody's perfect just the way that they are.

5:12I'm okay, you're okay. Man, this started when I was a little kid. This was before my time in the 1960s. There was literally a best-selling book called I'm Okay, You're Okay. Well, here's the truth. I'm not okay, and neither are you. And we can actually get better. Isn't that great? But when you tell somebody that, or you tell yourself that, or somebody tells you that, here's the problem. Here's the psychological problem. This is a social science show, after all. It creates what we call cognitive dissonance. Now, as most of you are aware, cognitive dissonance happens, occurs, is the idea that there are two competing truths.

5:46You hear this truth, and you hear that truth, and they compete with one another, and that creates a whole lot of discomfort. We don't like having cognitive dissonance, and so we need to resolve it. But here's how it works. You don't feel perfect. You don't feel perfect. You don't. And somebody says you're perfect. That creates a cognitive dissonance. Are you perfect, or are you imperfect? So how do you resolve that cognitive dissonance? You generally do so by reaching one of two logical conclusions. Either I feel crummy, even though I'm as good as I can possibly be, because the status quo is horrible,

6:21and there's no scope for self-improvement. You're the best you could possibly be, and the best is this, you say to yourself. That's grim, man. I mean, for almost everybody, that's grim, because life could be a lot better for most people. That's the whole adventure of self-improvement, is making life better. And so when you tell somebody, you're as good as you can get, and they don't feel like they're worth all that much, one way to resolve that cognitive dissonance is that life sucks. And that's just the way it is. That's not what you meant when you tell somebody that, but that's one way that they could actually resolve that.

6:56And I'm going to show you later evidence that that is, in point of fact, what a lot of people do. The second way you can resolve the cognitive dissonance is saying, yeah, you know, I am perfect the way I am, and things are crummy, which is evidence that the outside world is to blame for my unhappiness. In other words, there's something wrong, not with me, but with the whole outside world. And this is a dangerous way of living, because there are a lot of people who go through life saying, I can't be happy until the world changes. I mean, there's a lot of things that the world does need to do to change, but the truth of the matter is that your core competency is in you.

7:29And if you can't change to be better because you're as good as you could possibly be, you're perfect right now, then the conclusion that the world is all screwed up and tilted against you is going to create a whole lot of bitterness and resentment and helplessness. In other words, this is a problem to believe this about yourself or to tell this to other people, because it leads to either a kind of depression or a kind of bitterness, and neither one of those is good. It leads to a temporary good feeling, and then one of these two scenarios, typically,

7:59and we don't want either of these.

The Cost of Self-Enhancement Bias

8:01That's why I'm doing the show today, because we can do much, much better. We don't just have to criticize this and kind of lay into the old self-esteem movement. We can just do something better than that. Here's the truth. You're not perfect, and neither is anybody else. But as I mentioned before, that's incredibly good news, because if you accept the reality of your imperfection, you have hope of improving yourself and your life, and you'll be happier. That's what we want, right? Okay. Now, why would we want the illusion of perfection, even if it's wrong? And the answer to that is what we call self-enhancement bias.

8:34Psychologists have been measuring this for a long, long time. There are a lot of ways that social scientists look into this in the research. They'll look at the self-enhancement bias, which is this tendency to exaggerate our positive qualities and compare ourselves favorably with other people. I'll put up an interesting article about this, kind of a classic article from 1999 about this, called Taking Time Seriously, A Theory of Socio-Emotional Selectivity, that lays out the idea of self-enhancement bias. But this leads to all sorts of distortions and perception,

9:05that we want to exaggerate positive qualities, so we feel good about ourselves, which gives us this kind of ebullience, this ability to get through the day, while we'll exaggerate the bad qualities of other people so that we feel better in comparison to them. Because it's all comparative. Remember, I've talked in this show an awful lot about, in evolutionary biology, the fact that people live in hierarchical, that human beings were evolved to live in a hierarchical group of 30 to 50 individuals. And so the result of it is that you're evolved to feel better about yourself

9:36if you're rising in the hierarchy, meaning you have better qualities than they have worse qualities. And so we've developed a psychological bias because of this evolved tendency to rise, to want to rise in hierarchies, which we still do today. Now, there's all kinds of novel ways that we show the self-enhancement bias, some of which are pretty funny. You know, asking people, for example, are you an above average driver? 80% say yes. Well, that's not really possible, is it? And I would know a lot of people who think they're above average drivers who are not above average drivers.

10:06I, for one, recognize I'm in the 20% of drivers, like, yep, I'm not in the above, I'm not above average. I drive 2,500 miles a year. So if you see me on the road, look out, not very experienced. I'm not looking at my phone. I'm just kind of spaced out. Anyway, the point is that in any sort of interaction with other people, we're kind of positioning ourselves all the time and looking for ways that we're coming out on top, right? That we look a little bit more handsome or beautiful,

10:36that we look a little bit more clever, a little smarter. We're a little bit more right than the other people. And we exaggerate it. That's that self-enhancement bias, which is kind of an illusion. It's a distortion of reality. Think about it. When there's a lawsuit, a civil lawsuit between any two individuals, they both literally think they're right. I mean, you might think about the person who's suing you. Well, that evil SOB, that person, he knows he's wrong. Actually, he doesn't. He thinks he's, he almost certainly thinks he's right and thinks you're wrong and you think you're right and you think he's wrong.

11:07It's the judge's job to adjudicate, despite the fact that you both have a tremendous amount of self-enhancement bias. Judges are really, really good at sorting through the psychological biases that we have. That's kind of their gig when they're competent. Divorces are all based on the same thing. I've talked to, you know, a lot of couples who've divorced and you talk to both of them. It's like, it's always the other person's fault. I mean, not always. Sometimes they'll say, I screwed up, but not generally. Generally, it'll be, she didn't understand me and she'll say, he didn't, he was not emotionally available or something like that. It's almost,

11:39I was good and they were bad and that's why we broke up. Those are all based on this concept of self-enhancement bias where you rate yourself more highly on positive traits. People do this on positive moral traits. I'm more hardworking than others. I'm more honest than others. I'm warmer than others and they tend to rate other people more negatively on they're lazier than I am. They're colder than I am. They're more insecure than I am. Great paper on this one, 2017, called The Illusion of Moral Superiority. I'll put that in the notes. I love that paper.

12:09I've written about it. It's in Social and Psychological Personality Science. It happened to McKay. Now, this trend is most pronounced for young adults and middle-aged people who rank themselves as better than average on lots and lots of measures. You have less self-enhancement bias as you grow older. You're also less likely to hide a lot of your negative characteristics as you get older. And part of it is because you care a little bit less. And you've got to trust me on this. You know, people are more likely to try to hide a receding hairline. I mean, at this point, if I tried to hide

12:40a receding hairline, that would be, I'd have to like literally put a bird's nest on my head or something. It would be no way. But people do that when they feel that something is falling behind more when they're in early adulthood and middle adulthood than they do when they get older. By the way, this is one of the great constellations of age is that you're less likely to fall prey to self-enhancement bias, which frees you from the two resolutions of cognitive dissonance, which is either this is the best, that sucks, or everybody's out to get me. Neither one of those is any good

13:11and most people as they get older. It's one of the reasons that personality scientists have shown that neuroticism dramatically falls on average for people once they get past 50 years old. So if you have a lot of struggle with depression and anxiety and you're in your 20s or 30s, you can look forward to feeling better about it in no small part because you're going to be less biased about yourself. You're going to be more realistic about yourself. Now, what I want to do is accelerate that in this show. I want to accelerate that so that you can get beyond these self-enhancement biases now and get on

13:42with the business of living so that you can feel better about your life. Now, why do young adults do this so much? And it has very much to do with the idea of protection against the mental pain that comes with an invidious comparison with other people. And it does hurt. You know, as a matter of fact, when you're judged to be insufficient in something, neuroscientists find that the limbic system is very active. There's a place in your limbic system, I've mentioned it before on the show, called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, D-A-C-C,

14:13little d, capital A, capital C, capital C. You can Google that if you want. And that's one of the parts of your brain that's a pain center of your brain, but it's especially implicated in affective pain, that is to say, emotional pain. Rejection. There's a very interesting paper that shows that when people are playing in an fMRI machine, they're looking at their brains, and they're throwing a ball back and forth to each other, and suddenly on the screen that they're looking at, they start to be excluded from the ball-tossing game that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex becomes more active

14:43because they've been socially excluded. In this dumb, little trivial way, it makes you feel crummy about yourself. One of the things that you don't want is to feel bad about yourself. You don't want that aversive emotion of affective pain, and so one of the ways that you try to avoid it is by lying to yourself is what it comes down to. That's what it, and by the way, people who love you lie to you so that you don't feel that pain. I mean, I have kids. I have grandkids, but I don't want my kids to feel bad about themselves. I love them.

15:14So the result of it is that I'm likely to tell them a lie. You're perfect the way you are, even if they aren't. I want their dorsal anterior cingulate cortex to not be overly active. Boy, am I a nerd. Anyway, you get the whole point. Now, this is also really interesting in the way that we study it, not when we're looking at people who are trying to avoid depressive symptoms or sadness or anxiety, but people who have these symptoms already. There is a phenomenon well-studied in psychology

15:45called depressive realism. This is the case in which people who are suffering from mood disorders, most notably clinical depression, they more accurately assess their own characteristics and fall prey to less self-enhancement bias than do people who are not depressed. They're less likely to lie to themselves. And so, for example, when you leave the room, it's very possible that people go, like, ugh, right? They say, they do something that's not flattering to you when you leave the room

16:15sometimes, right? People who are not depressed, they literally don't know that. When people who are depressed, they usually assume that's true and they're often right. They know that, but that's hard. That's hard on your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. That's a difficult thing to bear up to, but this is another way of pointing out that people will relieve an immediate hit to their life satisfaction, to their immediate, to their mood, to their positive affect by lying to themselves

16:45a little bit. Okay, now it might seem like I'm making the case for self-enhancement bias. It might seem like I'm making the case that you should tell yourself you're just perfect so that you can avoid this pain, but I'm going to make the case right now, very shortly, that you shouldn't because the cost is not worth the benefit. The long-term cost is not worth the benefit. And it won't make you clinically depressed. It's just that clinically depressed people don't tend to do it. Okay, so this is what I'm going to tell you about being honest with yourself is not going to make you sad.

17:15I promise it's minor pain for big benefit down the line. Well, let's get that straight. But once again, this is not just what we tell ourselves. We don't just have self-enhancement bias. We also have a bias toward the enhancement of people that we love because we want to avoid that short-term pain. And so somebody says, you know, they're wearing some, you know, loud floral pants. Do you like them? And you're like, oh, it looks great when it looks awful, right? You're perfect the way you are, even though you look like a clown in those pants. When somebody's clearly

17:45at fault in their relationship, you say, you're not at fault, even though we are. That's a lie. And we do that kind of lie all the time because we want to blow up the good feelings of that person in the short run. Or, once again, you're perfect just the way you are. Don't change. I love your little quirks. Oh, I get it. You know, you have a hard time maintaining friendships and romantic relationships with other people. It's just because you're quirky. You haven't found your person yet. You're perfect the way you are. It's a lie. You know, and it's such a lie as we know that there's, you know, hilariously Al Franken,

18:16the former senator from Minnesota, but better known even than that as being a comedian who was for a long time on Saturday Night Live. And he had a character he used to play called Stuart Smalley. Any of you who's my age, you'll remember this, where he used to, he was a self-improvement guy. His whole motto was, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me. That's looking in the mirror and saying you're just perfect. But it's idiotic and ridiculous because it's a caricature of what we all do, what it comes down to.

18:47Okay, so here's the point that I'm trying to make. I'm not going to deny that self-enhancement, that you're perfect the way you are, feels good in the short term. But I will make the case that it's a terrible long-term solution to life's real problems. Sooner or later, despite your self-enhancement, you will be confronted with a painful adjustment in the form of the truth. And when that comes, after you've been engaging in self-enhancement bias, you're not going to like the result. And I've got a lot of the data here that I want to talk about.

19:17A study from 2001 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And again, I don't know how they got this past an internal review board because, man, this would be a hard experiment to run ethically. But two groups of students. One group was told, you're phenomenal, and the other got their actual grades. Right? One was like, you're good at everything, and the other's like, you're good at this, you're bad at this, you're falling behind here, you're below average, et cetera. And they wanted to know how it actually affected their feelings, and then how it affected their performance, and then how they felt

19:47in the long run. So three basic questions. Number one, how does it make you feel when you're in each one of these groups? How does it affect your academic performance? Because that's really what the compliments or criticisms were all about. And then how do you feel in the long run? Okay? And what they found was, sure enough, in the short run, the people who were getting buttered up by the researchers, they felt great about themselves, much better about themselves than the ones who were getting the truth, the unvarnished truth about their academic performance. Part two, those who were having their self-esteem

20:18blown up by the researchers, they didn't perform better. As a matter of fact, they did a little worse than those who actually got their true academic performance told to them. Right? So in other words, self-esteem didn't improve their performance, and this is super important because the self-esteem movement tells you just the opposite. If you butter these kids up in school, they're going to do so much better. Wrong. The data say it doesn't work.

20:44which led to lower self-esteem over the long run. Okay? That's the important thing because you know what? We live in the long run. College lasts a couple of years or, you know, my case, it actually took 11. But anyway, I digress. You're going to live for the rest of your life is what it comes down to. And so the truth is much better in the long run so that you can actually make adjustments, be accurate with yourself, have self-improvement, and all the things I'm about to talk about. So that's experimental research

21:15with human subjects that shows that all that stuff is nonsense. Here's a bigger problem. Here's the meta problem about that. Many people believe, and I tend to think that there's a lot of plausibility to this argument, the self-esteem movement, which has been so incredibly important over the past few decades with young people, has actually led to many of the mood disorders that we see today. How? By telling young people you're a winner, you're participation trophies, to say that, you know, everybody's perfect, just the way that they are, has led to the cognitive dissonance

21:46and the unproductive resolution of those dissonances that I talked about earlier. For example, if you tell young people when they're in a high state of synaptic plasticity, when their brains are forming, in other words, again and again and again, you're perfect just the way that you are, and it turns out that they run into all sorts of problems, academically, socially, economically, emotionally. They run into all the problems that people run into, especially in adolescence, then some of them are going to conclude that life is just crummy,

22:17that I'm perfect the way that I am, I can't get any better. They told me, I'm basically, I'm insuperable, I feel terrible about myself, I don't like my life. And that leads to depression and anxiety. There's a very plausible connection between telling kids things that will blow up their self-enhancement, their self-esteem earlier, and their depression and anxiety later. It's very possible that a big part of this tripling of depression, approximately a doubling of anxiety, depending on how you count it, oh my God, less than a young adult, has everything to do with the fact that

22:48we lied to them when they were young, that we didn't give them the honest truth when they were young. That's the first kind of resolution of cognitive dissonance. The second type is maybe even more dangerous, which is how you will learn that the world is against you, that you'll hate the world. And that's happened too. You know, the angry activism of college students, high school students and college students for the past decade or so, that's led to huge amounts of misery. I've talked about this periodically on the show. I've written about it a great deal, about the fact that the anger against the world, the idea that previous generations

23:19robbed me. I mean, again, I'm not against justice. I'm not against the truth of all the ways that we've harmed each other generationally, but the truth is it's unambiguously the case that we have more anger and fear and sadness from young people than at any other time since I've seen the data. And there's more activism than what we've seen before, which very plausibly is a resolution of the cognitive dissonance that comes from telling them that the world, that you're perfect the way that you are and when they feel crummy, it must be because the world is unjust.

23:51Now, the world is unjust, but that's not the right resolution for it because we want people to be able to take control of their lives. And I know that probably all of you agree with me, which is why you watch a show about how to take control of your life and how to feel better about your life. So we face a dilemma, don't we? We want to feel better and make other people feel better, but people's tendency to do so through self-enhancement and self-esteem boosting is a short-lived solution with possibly high

24:21and enduring ultimate costs. So what should we do for ourselves and for others? I'm going to recommend four things, okay? Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into

24:51your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling, you've got the cravings, you're addicted, you don't like it and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it, that's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you.

25:22Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're going to like how it feels. Here's a four-step approach

A Four-Step Approach to Truthfulness

25:31to being truthful with yourself and getting better and making life better and being happier at the same time. Or doing the same thing for people that you love in your life. Maybe even your kids. Number one. Here's the truth. You're not perfect. But you're normal. Because nobody's perfect. This is incredibly important to understand because once again, our Pleistocene brains that are still back in our tribe or band of 30 to 50 hierarchically arranged individuals, we feel if we're not

26:01as good as somebody else that that's abnormal. And we want to be normal by being better than other people. But the truth is that that's wrong too. You're imperfect, but it's really, really normal to be imperfect. To have pain is normal. To feel uncomfortable. To be sad is normal. To feel inadequate. To feel insecure. It's normal. And it's so important to tell yourself and to tell your kids, yeah, you know, I feel crummy today. That's a really, really normal thing. You know, that's a metacognitive practice.

26:32This is something that, you know, people do in, you know, Vipassana meditation or many forms of prayer to say, I feel insecure about myself. I feel sad about myself. I'm feeling bad about these particular circumstances. Why is that? To be introspective about that. To acknowledge the fact that these are normal human emotions being produced by a human brain that contains a functioning, healthy limbic system as a source of signals about the outside world. There's nothing bad about that. There's nothing normal about that. And then to say, this information is actually useful to me,

27:04very useful to me. Stay tuned because we don't want to leave it at that. That's just step one.

27:10I'm imperfect and I'm normal and so are you. Step two, I accept this. I accept myself. I mean, again, that's sort of the I'm okay and you're okay and I sort of trashed that a minute ago and I still would if this were the only piece of advice. Accepting yourself is one step in this. But it is an important step is to accept this. And again, this is not to say I'm okay but to accept the fact that this is reality is the way that this actually works. I accept my imperfections

27:41and I treat myself with a kind of compassion. You know, we often are so much harder on ourselves than we are to other people I recognize that because I'm such a striver and I'm such a perfectionist in everything that I do and I realize if anybody talked to me the way that I talk to myself I'd be so insulted. I mean, I would be scandalized if somebody talked to me that way. It would be hard for me to forgive anybody who talked to me the way that I talked to myself. You moron. Something dumb like taking a right when I was supposed to go left.

28:11Anybody did that and I was the passenger in the car and say, I think you needed to go right there.