PersonalityDimensionPerfectionism Test — Pressure on Yourself, on Others, from Others

Pressure on yourself

This dimension runs from “Accepts good enough” to “Demands flawless”.

Level by level

What each level of Pressure on yourself means

Heavy

The standard you hold your own work to is steep, and falling short of it costs you more than the work was worth. You rework things past the point others would call them finished, and a single flaw can spoil the whole of something you were pleased with an hour ago. This is the direction with the most genuinely mixed record: it sits behind a great deal of excellent work, and it is also the one that turns into exhaustion when the stakes are high and the deadline is long. What decides which way it goes is rarely the height of the bar. It is how long a miss stays with you — ten minutes and it's fuel, all evening and it's a tax.

Moderate

You want your work to be good and you're willing to put the hours in, but «done» is a category you actually use. A miss registers, costs you something, and then gets filed — you can tell the difference between work that isn't finished and work that isn't perfect, and you generally act on the first. This is the level most competent people run at, and it is the least discussed precisely because it doesn't produce a story. Its quiet cost is that the standard drifts with the environment: without much internal pressure holding it up, the bar tends to end up wherever the people around you have set theirs.

Light

You're not in the business of punishing your own work. Good enough is a real category rather than a defeat, finishing counts as part of quality, and a flaw you notice afterwards doesn't retroactively spoil what you made. That is worth more than it usually gets credit for: it is the disposition that ships things, recovers fast and doesn't need a run of successes to stay steady. What it doesn't come with is an internal alarm. Nobody is going to tell you the bar has quietly dropped on something that mattered, because the bar was never held anywhere anyone could see it — including by you.

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