The High Bar

High standards for your own work, no appetite for enforcing them on other people, and no sense of being judged from outside — this is the version of perfectionism the research is least worried about. The demand is internal and it is chosen, which is what makes it usable: you rework things because you want them right, not to avoid being caught out, and you can tell the difference between someone else's rough draft and a personal failing. The bar is still a bar, though, and the failure mode here is quiet rather than dramatic. Nobody is going to tell you the standard is too high, because nobody else is subject to it — so the signal that it has stopped paying arrives as tiredness rather than as feedback. The question worth asking is not whether the standard is worth it in general, but whether this particular thing was.