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Perfection 3.0: When the Perfect Girl Grows Up

“If life were one long grade school, girls would rule the world.”

This famous quote by Carol Dweck hits hard for all of us who were primed to be perfect girls. Of course, she’s right: in school, the quest for perfection may have served us well, but in the real world, there are no straight A’s. Inevitably, we grow up and discover very quickly that the rules have changed; suddenly, everything we’ve been taught backfires on us. The very same behaviors that used to pay off—like being nice, polite, and agreeable—suddenly end up costing us big-time, both literally and figuratively.

Playing nice doesn’t get us the promotions or positions of power—and it certainly doesn’t get us raises. Being overly accommodating lands us in situations and relationships we don’t necessarily want to be in. Minding our manners and staying quiet leaves us feeling queasy knowing that we didn’t tell our uncle Joe to shut it when he told one of his usual racist jokes, or call foul when a colleague took credit for an idea that was ours. Being sweet and ultrameticulous may earn us gold stars in the classroom, but by the time we hit the real world, those stars aren’t exactly raining from the sky.

I once met a woman at a conference in California who asked me, “How can I not strive to be perfect, when the world rewards perfection?” My answer to her was that maybe high school or college rewards perfection, but in the real world, it’s different. The real world rewards bravery.

The pursuit of perfection may set us on a path that feels safe, but it’s bravery that lets us veer off that “supposed to” path and onto the one we’re authentically meant to follow. Perfection might win us points for popularity at the office, but it’s bravery that lets us speak up and take a stand when we’re hit with workplace sexism or harassment. Having a 4.0 GPA, an impeccable interview outfit, and a charming smile may get us in the door, but we need bravery to get our work recognized and advance beyond entry-level. Having perfect hair or the perfect body might land us a date, but it takes bravery to fall in love, and to do it all over again after our hearts have been broken. Trying to be the perfect mom might win us tacit approval on the playground, but it takes bravery to give our child the freedom to explore and make mistakes even though we desperately want to wrap them in bubble wrap to protect them forever. Perfection might feel good for a few fleeting moments, but bravery powers us through the difficult times and deep losses that can feel insurmountable. By being brave, not perfect, we get to create and live lives that don’t just look good but are authentically, joyfully, messily, and completely ours.

How Did I Get Here?

“I didn’t know until I was in my late twenties that I had choices in life,” Ruth told me. She and I met while sitting side by side at a nail salon and struck up one of those unusually intimate conversations the way one sometimes randomly does with a complete stranger. Ruth got the message when she was young that an appropriate path for her was to become a teacher, get married, have kids, and then stay home to raise them. It didn’t even dawn on her that she had other options—that is, until she was twenty-eight and a friend of hers joined the Peace Corps and moved to South America. “All of a sudden I thought, wait a minute…you mean I can do that?!” At age sixty-two, Ruth says she sometimes wonders what turns her life might have taken if she’d looked within and asked herself what she really wanted.

All the lessons we learn as little girls have real consequences on our life choices. So many of us have been trained to please others—first and foremost our parents—and so we follow the “expected” path without questioning if it’s genuine for us. For some, like Ruth, it was getting married and having babies; for others, it’s working tirelessly to get ahead. I see this a lot in young women raised by immigrant parents like Yara, whose dad grew up in a tiny city in Holland, with a bed that came down out of the wall. “When he moved their family here, there was no question—none—that I had to succeed at everything,” she said. “It’s what he came here for.” Julianne is first-generation Asian American. At the age of thirty-one, her family’s disapproval of her life choices still stings. Her parents wanted her to become a doctor, but she got to a certain point in her training when she realized that wasn’t how she wanted to spend her life, so she quit medicine and chose something that she really likes. In the back of her mind, she still wonders if she’s a failure. “Anytime we have a family reunion,” she told me, “there’s a passive-aggressive undercurrent of ‘Why did you choose that…could you not make the other path?’ ” As a daughter of immigrant Indian parents, I totally relate. I thought if I did everything perfectly, got straight A’s, was number one on my debate team, and valedictorian in college that all the sacrifices my parents made as refugees would be worth it. So, even though I secretly dreamed of being in public service, I went to work at a prestigious law firm, knowing it would earn my father’s approval and praise. I hated my job, but I never let that show. I moved on and up to a high-paying job at a marquee-name financial firm, even though, for me, making money was only a means to an end (as in, to pay off my student loans and then go on to make a difference). Yet I made choice after choice like this, climbing up rung after rung on corporate ladders and making myself more miserable by the day. I spent all my free hours volunteering on political campaigns and giving back, but my day job in finance was completely disconnected from that. By the time I hit my early thirties, I was waking up most mornings curled in the fetal position, nursing the sick realization that my professional accomplishments were hollow. On paper you would have thought I had it made, but in reality I was way, way off my dream path.

That was a dark time in my life. My body and soul exhausted, I would often come home from work, change into comfy sweats, pour a glass of wine, turn on CNN, and just cry. I felt so stuck, not knowing what to do next and too scared to quit and free myself of the trap into which I’d fallen.

Until the day in 2008 when everything changed.

I remember so vividly it being one of those stifling hot August days in New York City, when the streets are gooey and standing on the subway platform makes you feel like you’re being roasted. I was sitting in my hermetically sealed, frigidly air-conditioned office on the forty-eighth floor in the heart of Midtown Manhattan in a fitted blue suit and four-inch heels that were killing me, trying to hold back the tears. Even my afternoon cappuccino tasted like fear and regret.

Less than two months earlier, I’d gone down to Washington, D.C., to offer support for my mentor Hillary Clinton as she gave her concession speech, ceding the 2008 Democratic nomination to then senator Barack Obama. I’d worked so hard volunteering on her campaign and, like so many others, felt disheartened and deflated. As I watched her speak, with tears streaming down my face, one message particularly stuck with me: that just because she failed doesn’t mean that the rest of us should give up on our goals and dreams. I’d felt like she was speaking directly to me.

On that sweltering August day, I was replaying Hillary’s speech in my head—as I had many times in the weeks since—when my phone pinged. It was Deepa, one of my best friends from law school. She knew me when I was still a bright-eyed graduate who believed I could do and be anything (she once walked in on me standing on her balcony practicing my presidential acceptance speech). I was never so happy to see a name light up on my phone! I quickly walked across the somber, hushed office into a windowless conference room in the back, closed the privacy blinds, kicked off those miserable heels, and picked up the call. The instant I heard Deepa’s voice, the flood of tears came rushing out. I must have sounded a little nuts, sobbing and hiccupping as I told her I couldn’t take this corporate job anymore…that I felt so empty…that my life had no purpose. She listened patiently until I was finished, paused, and then she said, simply and quietly, “Just quit.” Maybe it was the inspiration from Hillary’s strength and resilience, or hearing my best friend give me permission to do something I was terrified to do, but for the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt a glimmer of hope.

Shortly after that, I worked up the courage to tell my father that I wanted to quit my job and run for office. I was worried that he would say I shouldn’t do it, which would have tapped right into my fear of his disapproval and made me give up on the idea entirely. When I dialed the phone to call him, I was so nervous that my hands were shaking; I really wanted this and didn’t want anything to dim my excitement. You know what he said? “It’s about time!” I never felt more proud to be my father’s daughter than I did that day—and never wanted to kick myself harder for not going to him with my truth earlier. In the long run, I ended up making his American dream come true by going after my own.

I’ve met so many girls and women who made the same early mistakes I did. Like Melissa, an art history major who let her dream of being an artist waft away when she got married at twenty-two to her nice (but boring) Jewish boyfriend at the none-too-subtle urging of her religiously conservative parents. Almost on autopilot, she moved into a nice-size house and built a social life that was a mini-replica of theirs, including joining their synagogue. For a couple of years, she cheerfully played the part of gracious hostess and suburban wife, until the Is this it? feeling started to creep in. At twenty-five, she woke up one morning, looked around at her pristinely manufactured home and life, and thought, Oh, hell no. This isn’t where my story ends. By her twenty-sixth birthday, Melissa was single, working for almost no money as a receptionist in an art gallery, and living in a tiny walk-up in Brooklyn. Was her life perfect? No. But she’d never been happier, because she’d let go of the expectation that it had to be.

The Myths of Perfection

Something interesting happened when I first started talking with women about perfection. I’d start off by asking them what I thought was a softball question to open the conversation: “Do you believe you need to be perfect?” I assumed the answer would obviously be yes, but nearly all of them said the exact opposite. I began to wonder if maybe I had it all wrong.

Then I realized they were answering the question from the very same style of thinking I was trying to unravel. They were giving me what they assumed was the right answer—the perfect answer—the answer that said of course they know that the pursuit of perfection is a demoralizing waste of time and energy. And yet all the stories I was hearing were telling a very different tale.

So from then on, when I spoke to groups of women, I changed the question. Instead of a binary yes or no question, I asked them instead to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being that they were strongly driven to do everything in their lives to perfection. Just as I suspected, once I eliminated the suggestion of a “right” answer, a different picture began to emerge; the average answer was between 8 and 10. Once the floodgates began to open, I asked them if friends and family ever suggested that they were holding themselves to unreasonable standards; the answer was usually yes. I asked them if they believed that no matter what they did, they should’ve done better. That one scored an almost unanimous yes.

After talking to hundreds of women ranging from teenagers to senior citizens, from all backgrounds and walks of life, I’ve learned that perfectionism isn’t simple or one-dimensional. It’s a complex knot of lifelong beliefs, expectations, and fears. Our attitudes toward it are confusing and inconsistent; we nurture and feed it but wish like hell we could shake it. It can be an unforgiving taskmaster, naysayer, and critic all rolled into one. It greets us every morning as we stare in the mirror and keeps us awake, rehashing and ruminating over our mistakes, long into the night.

Sometimes perfectionism tells us that other people won’t accept or value or love us unless we’re perfect (what psychologists call “socially prescribed perfectionism”); other times it feels like we’re the ones pushing ourselves to reach our own impossible standards (“self-oriented perfectionism”). Either way, it’s a nagging presence that whispers in our ear, constantly reminding us of all the ways we failed others and ourselves.

Perfect-girl training aside, we’re now smart, savvy women who intelligently know the pursuit of perfection is absurd. Yet it still rules our lives. Why? Because whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, we still buy into some outdated myths about what being perfect will do for us. It’s time to drag out these stubborn lies and kick them to the curb once and for all.

Myth 1: Polished Equals Perfect

From a very young age, we’re taught that if we’re polished on the outside, we’ll get the perfect job, the perfect man, the perfect life. But polished doesn’t equal perfect, and it definitely doesn’t guarantee the happy ending. Believe me, I should know.

The delusion we harbor is that if we’re perfect in how we look, sound, or behave, our secret—that we are actually not perfect—is safe. If we come off as flawless, we are beyond reproach: shielded from judgment or criticism. So we obsessively polish our veneer to keep any ugly insecurities, feelings, or flaws hidden from view.

Early on in my run for Congress, I was a wreck. A very worried wreck. I was nervous about whether I really had what it took to hold office. I felt like I needed to be an issues expert on everything from Iraq to potholes—what if someone asked me a question and I didn’t have the answer? I already had my young age and lack of experience stacked against me; would I be seen as incompetent, not smart enough to do the job? I may have seemed tough and composed on the surface, but inside I was riddled with anxiety and self-doubt.

So I focused on the only thing I could control: my stump speech. Oh my god, I was so obsessed with that stump speech. I wrote and rewrote it dozens of times and memorized every word. I watched countless videos from great orators and rehearsed it over and over in my head while lying in bed, while brushing my teeth, while walking to the subway. I convinced myself that if I gave a flawless speech, I would appear flawless and spare myself the wrath of critics. I thought my flawless speech would be like a shield, that it would put me in control of how I was perceived. Needless to say, I was wrong. The haters still found plenty to hate on, from my words to my footwear. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the only thing that can truly protect me is my inner bravery.

For many of us, our appearance is our armor. If our outfit, hair, makeup, jewelry, shoes, and everything else are perfect, we feel in control. Yet this is an illusion that assumes we have power over how other people view and respond to us. One petite blond entrepreneur told me she gets her hair and makeup professionally done before she pitches to potential investors. “It’s as if they can’t fuck with me if I have a blowout,” she said with a laugh. But the reality is that we’re never really in control. Not of what people think of us in their private thoughts, and definitely not of what happens once we step away from the primping mirror or our carefully crafted notes. Of course anyone can fuck with you, with or without a blowout.

It wouldn’t be possible to talk about women and perfectionism without mentioning the most obvious and insidious way we torture ourselves: our bodies. On average, a woman spends 127 hours per year fretting about her weight and how many calories she consumes. Over a lifetime, that adds up to one full year that we give to obsessing over the size and shape of our bodies. It’s been estimated that between 80 and 89 percent of women are unhappy with their weight. Ten million women in this country have eating disorders. Even more disturbingly, the National Eating Disorders Association reports that 81 percent of ten-year-old girls are afraid of being overweight.

A few days following a packed focus group I did in New York City, I got an email from a participant named Marta who had sat quietly on the floor throughout the evening. But in her email she wrote candidly about how the whole experience had been very “meta” for her—here she was at an intimate gathering to talk about how perfectionism and fear hold us back, and she was too intimidated by the accomplished women sitting on the sofa across from her (she called them “the couch women”) to speak up. I told Marta I was grateful to her for reaching out to me, as the story she then shared is one I think many of us can relate to in one way or another.

At a young age, she’d internalized the pressure to maintain a perfectly polished exterior from her mother, who had never, in the thirty-two years Marta had been on this earth, been outside of their house without a full face of makeup on. She was thin and very pretty and had always been in good shape, and Marta described to me how, in high school, boys would tell her that her mom was “hot,” which made her feel nauseated and like she’d never measure up. “I was too big, my hair was too curly, my nose was too broken,” she wrote.

These deep insecurities drove her to fix her nose when she was sixteen, which was also around when she stopped playing basketball, a game she had loved since childhood. “At seventeen, I tried straightening my hair (once) and literally cried about it,” Marta recalled. “At eighteen, I left for college and immediately gained ten pounds by eating and drinking like a frat boy; and then gained another ten pounds soon after by ‘going on a diet’ that consisted of eating my dessert before my dinner. As I got heavier and heavier my freshman year, I learned that a really easy way to forget that you’ve lost all control is to get blackout drunk and lose all control. So I did that for a few years, ashamed of my body, feeling hopeless.” Marta told me that for as long as she could remember, the idea of trying hard to look “perfect” (working out, eating healthily, wearing makeup) made her feel pathetic—so she just let it all go. “I felt like if I couldn’t be perfect, there was no use trying,” she said. She added that over the years she’d made a lot of progress in terms of how she felt about her body and her weight, but admitted that those childhood messages had been hard to shake. “Even now, at thirty-two, I have to consciously remind myself that I am more than my body,” she said. “That if I can’t fit into a pair of jeans, I still have a meaningful career and friends and family whom I love and who love me. I have to remind myself of these things. And that feels insane.” Unfortunately, the pressures to appear flawless are definitely not in our imagination. And neither is the fact that it’s not the same for men. Hillary Clinton once remarked that during her 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama could just “roll out of bed and into a suit,” while she spent hours prepping hair, makeup, and wardrobe before every appearance. When you’re a woman on that size stage (I’d argue on any stage, for that matter), there’s no room for error in how you look.

The examples are endless. Rihanna is photographed in baggy jeans one day and a sportswriter dedicates an entire blog post to how she “looks like she is wearing a sumo suit” and wondering whether she was “going to make being fat the hot new trend”? (Thankfully, the blowback was swift and he was summarily fired.) Jennifer Aniston once dared to eat a cheeseburger shortly before being photographed in a bikini and the entire Twittersphere was abuzz speculating whether she was “just gaining weight,” or pregnant.

Just to add a little more fuel to the insecurity fire, these days we’re not only supposed to look flawless, we’re also supposed to pull off being thin and toned with straight white teeth, radiant skin, and glossy hair without looking like we’re even trying. Seems growing up doesn’t make us immune to the pressure of “effortless perfection” that plagues our girls. As a recent article by Amanda Hess in the New York Times points out, society now puts the onus on women to look within to overcome crises of beauty confidence, as if it’s entirely self-generated and the unreasonable standards thrown at us from every direction don’t exist. “The reality is that expectations for female appearance have never been higher,” writes Hess. “It’s just become taboo to admit that.” While most of us don’t have to worry about our appearance being picked apart in the pages of US Weekly, we all feel body and beauty pressure in our own way. What’s important here is to recognize how closely and incorrectly we’ve linked having a killer wardrobe, unblemished skin, and a toned booty with being perfect—and how false and fleeting the sense of control that gives us is.

A lovely woman named Evelyn told me a story about having to see her ex-husband and his new (much younger) wife at her daughter’s wedding. She was so tied up in knots about it that she spent three months leading up to the event “perfecting” herself. She went on a strict diet to lose ten pounds, dyed her hair, and tried on countless dresses and shoes until she found the “perfect” combination. When the day of the wedding came, she looked spectacular—and still felt sad, jealous, and all the other emotions she was hoping to keep at bay. “Don’t get me wrong,” Evelyn said. “I felt like a million bucks, and that helped. But it wasn’t a miracle cure—not by a long shot.” Obviously, I’m not suggesting we should all let ourselves go and start showing up for events or meetings looking like we don’t give a crap. Appearance does matter, at least to a degree in terms of making a good impression. But having said that, there’s a big difference between being appropriate and torturing ourselves in an attempt to look “perfect.” If looking fabulous gives you a boost of confidence, by all means do it! Beauty is meant to be a joyful form of self-expression, and I’m the first person to admit that a bold red lipstick makes me feel on point. It’s when we start obsessing and clutching on to flawlessness as a security blanket that we know we’ve tipped over into unhealthy territory.

Myth 2: Once Everything Is Perfect, I’ll Be Happy

I once read that the amount of money a person needs to be happy is always 10 percent more than they have. That seems like a great analogy for how we chase the elusive carrot of perfection.

The thinking goes something like this: If I look the right way, have the right job, land the right partner, everything will fall into place and I’ll be happy. I’ve fallen prey to this flawed logic myself. When I was younger, I thought if I worked out five times a week to have the “ideal” size 2 body like my sister’s and went to Ivy League schools, I would meet the perfect guy who loved my brains and would support me unconditionally. We would have three perfect children and I’d become the president of the United States. I thought I could plan my life to be exactly as I dreamed, but only if I followed the script as perfectly as possible. I’m far from alone in this skewed perception.

To achieve our perfect ideal, we log our ten thousand steps a day, work out seven times a week, cut carbs out of our diets. We read endless articles, blogs, and books on how to advance in our careers, find work-life balance, attract the ideal partner. We go after the hot job or role in our community that everyone tells us we’d be perfect for. We have two point five kids, buy the perfect house, acquire all the right stuff.

And yet, are we happy?

The numbers say no. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one out of every four women will experience severe depression in her lifetime. A seminal study done in 2009 at the University of Pennsylvania called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” (how’s that for telling?) showed that although women’s lives have improved over the past thirty-five years in terms of increased opportunities, higher wages, and freedom from domestic drudgery via technological advancements, their happiness has declined. We should be happier, but we’re not.

When we’re chasing perfection, we can end up in jobs, relationships, and life situations we don’t necessarily want to be in. We think that checking all the requisite boxes will lead to joy and fulfillment, but eventually we get to the bottom of the list and think, Oh, shit…why am I not happy?

Tonya is a talented illustrator who gets paid big bucks for her work. For more than twenty years, she’s been regarded as one of the best in her business, with several prestigious awards to show for it. Her career provides her with lots of praise and admiration from others, not to mention good money. The only thing it doesn’t bring her is joy.

Tonya doesn’t hate her job; she’s quick to point that out. But she doesn’t love it, either. The spark went out of it for her a few years ago, and she’s just going through the motions. She’s got a decent amount of money saved, so that’s not a major issue, but when I asked her why she didn’t stop doing it and try something else that turned her on, she just sighed.

I know that sigh. I remember heaving it myself back when I was a young rising star at a fancy law firm, earning lots of praise and a big paycheck but hating every second of it. I’ve heard that sigh from many other women who feel stuck in roles in which they’re “successful.” I know it sounds funny to talk about being trapped by something we excel in. First world problems, right? But all problems demand we develop our bravery if they are ever to get solved.

One of the hallmarks of happiness is having close, meaningful connections with others. But keeping up a façade of having it all together keeps us isolated, because it keeps us from forging real, honest, deep relationships where we can fully be ourselves and feel accepted exactly as we are.

It’s not that there’s anything objectively wrong with our jobs, relationships, or lives—unless they are ones we didn’t authentically choose; unless they are a reflection of everything we believed we were supposed to pursue rather than our real passions. After a lifetime of chasing other people’s dreams (whether we’re actually aware that’s what we’re doing or not), worrying about what others think, or following a prescribed formula for what we think our lives “should” look like, our own desires and goals get blurred. It’s like driving a car with the navigation system yelling out dozens of different instructions all at the same time. Go right, go left, make a U-turn…eventually your own sense of direction gets drowned out.

We choose partners who fit the bill, even if we aren’t genuinely in love or happy. (While this is speculation on my part, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the percentage of married women who report having affairs has risen 40 percent over the past twenty years.) We move into idyllic homes or lives—whatever form that takes for us—then feel disappointed that everything feels forced and plastic. Even with the people closest to us, we feel like we need to hide the truly ugly, messy, real stuff behind a glossy façade; then we wonder why our relationships feel hollow. We pursue opportunities or degrees that loved ones encourage us to do, believing that’s the ticket to our happiness. Or, like a lot of women I met, we stay years too long in a career we don’t love simply because we’re good at it. Even when we wake up and realize that we are in the wrong career, or relationship, or life, the idea of making a change is terrifying, partly because we take it as a sign of failure and partly because it means we may have to go way outside our comfort zone to start over.

When I give talks at colleges, I often tell the story about how I spent so many years climbing the corporate ladder without ever questioning whether it was truly what I wanted. Once, after a speech I gave at Harvard, a young woman of color came running up to me as I was getting into a cab to say, “Everything you just said in your speech was ME.” She told me about how she’d done everything she could to get to where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in early learning education, never asking herself if that was going to make her happy. She realized now that wasn’t at all what she wanted to do, but she was doing it because it was simply the next credential she was tracked to earn.

Cindy is a stunning woman who literally looks like she stepped off the pages of a fitness magazine. She told me about how she’d finally reached the state of absolute physical perfection that she’d always wanted, but it ended up feeling empty. She wasn’t any happier, her marriage wasn’t any better, her teenage son’s mental health issues were not any more under control. It seems that even if you do get to flawless, not much changes. No fireworks, no trophies, no guarantee of happiness—nothing but a vague sense of dissatisfaction and a feeling of Is this it?

We are trained to assume that if we connect all the perfect dots, it’s going to bring us fulfillment. We don’t even know how much of this in so ingrained in us. The thought is revolutionary when it hits us: Maybe “the perfect life” isn’t really all that perfect after all.

Myth 3: If I’m Not Perfect, Everything Will Fall Apart

When flawlessness is the ideal, flaws by definition cannot be tolerated. It’s not so much the mistakes we make that get to us; it’s what we make them mean. In the mind of a perfectionist, a mistake is a sign of a personal flaw. The internal spin happens fast: It’s not just that I rambled a little in a meeting; it’s that my colleagues will now forever think I’m stupid. It’s not that I forgot to send in the permission slip for the class trip; it’s that my kid’s teacher—and probably my kid—now thinks I’m a shitty parent. It’s not just that my date will be disappointed that I had to cancel on him at the last minute; now he’ll never ask me out again and I’ll die alone.

Lilly, an assistant to a publicist, spent an entire weekend in the throes of panic because she hadn’t answered an email as soon as she should have, and she was sure her boss would be upset when she found out. “On Saturday I went to lunch with a girlfriend and spiraled all the way into, ‘Maybe I should just forget working and go back for my master’s…’ I was so scared I was going to get fired, I came in at seven a.m. Monday morning and organized everything in sight so I could be beyond reproach.” I came across a recent study done by a professor at Auburn University which found that fewer women than men believe they meet their own standards in terms of family and work commitments. One expert commenting on the study added that women experience a lot of guilt as they try to juggle their work and home life. No disrespect meant here, but my immediate response when I read these shocking newsbreaks was, “Well…duh.” I don’t think the pressure to do everything perfectly shows up anywhere more profoundly than for working moms. Let’s be serious: even when we have amazing 50/50 spouses or life partners, we are usually the ones who know what’s in the diaper bag, or remember to grab the pacifier, or have the babysitter’s numbers on speed dial. We’ve done a great job of internalizing the message that anything less than a perfect mom equals a bad mom.

I travel a lot for my work and feel unrelenting pressure and guilt about spending too much time apart from my kid. So I am constantly editing and reediting my schedule to minimize the time I’m away. When I’m in town, I’ll get up at 5 a.m. to go to the gym so I’m done before my son gets up and I can sit with him while he eats breakfast and get him dressed for school. My husband is a great dad, but he doesn’t have that same kind of guilt. If he has an early meeting and I’m not in town, he has no problem letting the babysitter do the breakfast and dressing routine. Even our bulldog, Stan, activates my mom guilt: when she’s up and howling to go out at 7 a.m., I’ll take her, even though I know that when I’m away, she’ll happily snooze until 10 a.m. when Nihal is showered, shaved, and dressed.

Women are the ones who give away all of our “me” time to our partners and our children. But let’s be brutally honest here: we often bring this on ourselves. Could our partners pack the diaper bag and make the kids’ breakfast and make arrangements with the babysitter? Absolutely. Will they do it exactly the way we want them to? Probably not. But if we assume they won’t do it 100 percent right, we figure we’ll just do it our damn selves.

A national survey designed by the Families and Work Institute revealed that much of the time pressure women deal with is self-imposed because they have trouble delegating or letting go of control. Some have argued that women take on more of these parenting tasks because they are more nurturing by nature. But how much of what we’re talking about here is really fundamental nurturing? When I think about nurturing, I think of tending to my son’s physical and emotional well-being: caring for him when he spikes a fever, comforting him when his favorite stuffed froggy goes missing. It’s our modern-day obsession with being the perfect mom—or what feminist sociologist Sharon Hayes dubbed “the ideology of intensive mothering”—not a nurturing instinct, that tells me I have to have every one of the necessary (and very best) school supplies on hand, feed him organic snacks, and teach him the alphabet before he turns twenty-one months old because we (okay, I) read somewhere that that’s a sign of genius.

Dads, for the most part, don’t feel that same pressure. They don’t feel the same soul-crushing guilt if they don’t nail the parenting minutia, because they never aimed for that perfection marker in the first place. I laugh every time I see the Pedigree Dentastix commercial featuring a young dad supervising his very messy toddler eating in the high chair. The child ends up with food all over his face, so the dad runs out of the room to get a wet towel to clean him up. By the time he gets back, the family dog has licked the baby’s face clean. Dad pauses, assesses the situation, then shrugs and cheerfully responds, “That’ll work.” Can you imagine how freeing it would feel to be like that?

The image of washing your kid’s face with doggie slobber aside, I want to emphasize that giving up the expectation of perfection is not the same as being a bad parent or lowering your standards. It isn’t the standards at all that we need to change, but our thinking about what it means if we do or don’t reach them. It’s great to want to feed your kid healthy meals. At the same time, he will not keel over from malnourishment if you feed him frozen chicken nuggets for dinner now and then. Punctuality and routine are good parenting practices. That being said, if you are unintentionally late to pick your kid up from day care because your rideshare was trapped behind a garbage truck, chances are you won’t have done permanent psychological damage.

Being able to handle it all doesn’t require perfection. It demands bravery. It takes bravery to let go of control and delegate, to aim for 100 percent but be okay if you come in at 90, to make mistakes and own up to them without sliding into shame. It takes bravery to take care of yourself and say no when that voice in your head is telling you to sacrifice everything for your job and family (and your friend who calls for relationship advice six times a week…and your kid’s PTA…and your neighbor who asked you to walk his dog while he’s away…). It takes bravery to give yourself a break and refuse to let guilt dictate your daily life, and to model self-compassion for your kids by letting them see it’s okay to screw up.

It takes bravery to retire our perfect girl and trade her in for the new model of brave woman. But it’s worth it.

Myth 4: Perfection Is the Same as Excellence

It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’re aiming to be perfect because we have high standards and want to excel. What could be wrong with that? But our perfect girl training has muddied the waters here. The truth is we can be excellent without being perfect; they aren’t one and the same.

The difference between excellence and perfection is like the difference between love and obsession. One is liberating, the other unhealthy. Perfection is an all-or-nothing game; you either succeed or fail, period. There are no small victories, no “A” for effort. If you’re a perfection seeker and you fail at anything, it can really take you out.

When you are pursuing excellence, on the other hand, you don’t let failure break you, because it’s not a win or lose kind of game. Excellence is a way of being, not a target you hit or miss. It allows you to take pride in the effort you put in regardless of the outcome. I’ll be the first one to tell you that it’s great to have high personal standards. You should prepare well and strive to do your best in that interview, meeting, event, speech, game, or project—personal or professional. There’s nothing wrong with having a healthy desire to excel, even to win. What’s not okay is setting impossible goals and expectations or beating yourself up if you don’t get the ideal results.

You know you’re crossing the line from the pursuit of excellence into perfectionism when you feel like nothing is ever enough. A big clue is if you don’t know when to celebrate. I still have to watch myself on this one. People will say, “Wow, Reshma, you’ve accomplished a lot,” and immediately a needling little voice in my head says, Not really. That’s the ghost of perfectionism talking, and it sucks all the joy right out of the experience. But if you chase excellence instead of perfection, you get to actually feel proud of your achievements. These days, I’m working on taking moments to celebrate when I accomplish something. I’ll turn up my girl Beyoncé really loud and dance around my living room, get one of those decadently good chocolate chip cookies from my favorite bakery, or even tweet a little congratulatory note to myself.

Perfection can really ruin a good thing. Instead of allowing us to see everything we did right, it demands that we hyperfocus on the one thing that wasn’t 100 percent. For example, my TED talk has had over almost four million views; countless women have emailed to tell me how much it moved them, and Fortune magazine even called it one of the most inspiring speeches of 2016. But you know what I saw when I watched it? Overly curled hair and makeup that looks ridiculously vamped up. There I was making an impact on the lives of millions of girls and women, and all I could think was, Why didn’t anyone tell me I looked like I was going clubbing instead of getting onstage to give a speech in front of millions of people?

When my friend Tiffany Dufu published her amazing book, Drop the Ball, it received glowing reviews and was hailed by Gloria Steinem as “important, path-breaking, intimate and brave.” Instead of reveling in this incredible praise, she became fixated on a couple of negative Amazon reviews (even though they were far outnumbered by positive ones). “You’d have thought my world was falling apart every time anyone wrote something critical,” she said. Another case of perfectionism robbing us of pride in excellence.

It’s become a bit of a cliché to call yourself a perfectionist in a job interview, thinking it implies a strong work ethic and high attention to detail. The irony is that perfectionism actually impedes excellence. It causes us to overthink, overrevise, overanalyze: too much perfecting, not enough doing.

You might be thinking, Sure, some imperfection is fine in some jobs, but we all want our trusted professionals, like doctors or lawyers, to be perfectionists, right? But the research makes a compelling case for why that thinking is upside down. For example, a 2010 study of twelve hundred college professors found that those who strive for perfection are less likely to get published or receive citations. Research confirms that the most successful people in any given field are less likely to be perfectionistic, because the anxiety about making mistakes gets in your way, explained psychologist Thomas Greenspan in a New York magazine article. “Waiting for the surgeon to be absolutely sure the correct decision is being made could allow me to bleed to death.” Myth 5: Failure Is Not an Option

If failure isn’t an option, then neither is taking risks. That, right there, is how perfection strangles bravery.

The fear of failure is so huge. We’re afraid that if we try something outside our comfort zone and fall short, we’ll look foolish and forever be identified with our failure. We’re afraid it will be proof that we’ll never meet our expectations of ourselves—or the expectations of others. We will end up disgraced, ashamed, emotionally and professionally decimated. What if it breaks us and we can’t pick ourselves back up?

When I lost my congressional race, I thought I was done, washed up for good, my dream to be a public servant on a national scale dead in its tracks. I woke up the morning after in the hotel room my staff had (rather optimistically) decorated with congratulatory balloons and congratulatory notes stuck everywhere on Post-its, feeling sick to my stomach. I’d let down all the people who had invested in and supported me, my voters, my friends, my family. As a candidate, I was sure my career was in ruins; as a human, I felt utterly and sickeningly like garbage.

It took me a few months of nursing my wounds before I was ready to pick up my head. Once I did, I discovered a new dream that has allowed me to serve and make a difference in exactly the way I can now see that I was meant to. I’d always thought my calling was to be on Capitol Hill, but I found that if I wanted to innovate and make a real difference, my path would be through creating a movement of girl coders who will grow up to solve our nation’s and our world’s most pressing problems. And here’s the thing: I never would have learned that if I hadn’t tried something and failed. If I had never run for office, I never would have visited classrooms on the campaign trail and seen the gender divide in schools and the potential talent our economy was missing out on. I never would have had the idea for Girls Who Code and I never would have had the privilege to help tens of thousands of girls around the country believe that they can do anything. Nor would I have cultivated the rock-solid belief that I can do anything.

In start-up world, failure is celebrated as a necessary part of innovation, and the entrepreneurial “fail early and often” mentality is beginning to spread. These days, we’re seeing a lot of momentum to destigmatize failure both in education and in the world of business, and I love it. Smith College, for example, recently launched a program called “Failing Well” to teach high-achieving students how to deal with and even embrace setbacks, and Stanford, Harvard, Penn, and others have followed suit with similar initiatives. At the NYC-based media start-up theSkimm, founders Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin instituted a “Fail So Hard” hat ritual in which they pass around a hard hat at staff meetings for anyone who tried something new and failed that week to proudly wear while sharing their story.

I’m here to tell you that failing IS an option. I didn’t just fail when I lost my race for the US Congress, I also did it again in 2013, in an unsuccessful bid for the office of public advocate of New York City. I failed last month when I spaced and forgot my niece’s birthday, and again this morning when I put on my son’s diaper and he peed on me. By failing, I learned how to embrace imperfection. I’m not afraid of either anymore. In the words of Hillary Clinton, I’d rather be “caught trying” than not at all.

Myth 6: I Need to Be Perfect to Get Ahead

Sadly, it is still true that women need to work twice as hard to earn the same respect as men in their work. Being the ultimate overachievers, most of us take that to mean that to succeed we need to not just be excellent—we need to be perfect.

The problem here is that perfection doesn’t get us ahead. In fact, it sabotages us in more ways than we even realize.

A study released in 2015 from LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co shows that women don’t step up to positions of senior leadership not because of family obligations, but because they don’t want the stress and pressure that comes along with that level of responsibility. As the Wall Street Journal reported in a summary of this study, “The path to senior positions is disproportionately stressful for women.” I believe this is true, but I think this disproportionate stress arises in part because women think they need to do the job perfectly.

How many career opportunities have we passed up because we were afraid of being rejected or failing? How many times have we begged off an assignment or promotion saying, “I’m just not good at that”? No question that the glass ceiling and double bind are factors in women’s advancement, but I believe our perfect-girl hardwiring is also a significant part of the reason women are underrepresented in leadership positions in the corporate world, in government, and elsewhere. Women don’t run for office because they believe they won’t fare as well as men, even though the research proves that’s not at all the case. It’s the fear of exposing our less-than-perfect selves or the belief that we don’t have the ideal leadership skills that interferes, not capability.

I have worked with many men in law, in finance, and now in the tech industry, and one trait they all seem to have in common is a willingness to step up to take on a challenge—regardless of whether or not they’re ultraprepared for it. If I ask my team at Girls Who Code who wants to spearhead a new business opportunity, without fail the dudes around the table will immediately step up—even the ones who’ve never done anything in that area before. Like the time my VP of finance, for example, eagerly volunteered to take over Human Resources even though he had zero prior HR experience and the organization was looking to grow by 300 percent over the next year. If I ask one of my female employees to head up a big project in new and unfamiliar territory, however, more often than not she’ll question whether she’s qualified to take the lead or ask if she can sleep on it (which most of the time comes back with a no).

I’ve seen countless men launch entire businesses without worrying about having the relevant training or expertise. Jack Dorsey, a cofounder of Twitter, started Square because he was curious about finding a way to make payments easier, not because he was knowledgeable about mobile payment. He had no experience building a financial services company, but that didn’t stand in his way. Three tech dudes in their twenties founded the cool and successful beauty product app Hush when they realized—almost by accident—that makeup was the top seller on their bargain-driven site. Instead of saying, “We’re guys…we don’t know anything about makeup,” they went out and put together a staff that was 60 percent women to steer them in the right direction.

This is in stark contrast to Tina, the smart, talented woman who cuts my hair. Tina wants to open her own salon, but because she doesn’t know how to build a website or start a company, she’s resigned herself to staying where she is. So much of this is tied into the “effortless perfection” ideal we’ve been taught as girls. As Rachel Simmons points out, when you believe you’re supposed to make it all look easy, and pretend like you’ve got a handle on everything, you lose out on building a very important skill: admitting you need help. Instead of asking for help with her idea, Tina talked herself out of it. At some time or another, most of us have done the same.

The perfection ideal also hits us squarely in the paycheck. There has been a lot of talk about why there is a persistent wage gap between men and women. Is the gender and structural discrimination women face an insurmountable barrier? Are women simply picking industries that pay less? Or is it the pressure we put on ourselves to do the job perfectly that makes us opt out of high-paying opportunities? There’s also the negotiation factor to consider when we think about money we may be leaving on the table. It’s difficult to press for more when you’re worried about seeming pushy.

This fear lurks in the majority of women, no matter how accomplished or powerful. When Academy Award–winning actress Jennifer Lawrence discovered that she earned significantly less than her male costars on the blockbuster hit American Hustle, she blamed herself for not having pressed for her fair share because she’d been worried about how she would be perceived. “I would be lying if I didn’t say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight,” she wrote in the feminist newsletter Lenny. “I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’ At the time, that seemed like a fine idea, until I saw the payroll on the Internet and realized every man I was working with definitely didn’t worry about being ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’ ” That’s exactly why we need to cultivate the courage to demand and earn the money we deserve.

The only thing Perfect Girl 3.0 can tolerate less than making mistakes is getting negative feedback. Nora works at the front desk of a hotel, where she’s given quarterly performance reviews. Even if 90 percent of her review is positive, she zooms right in on the 10 percent her boss says needs improvement. Even though it’s meant to show how and when she can better serve the hotel guests, all she hears is how she’s screwed up and disappointed her boss. “I take it well up front, but I die inside,” she said. “It eats me alive for days.” Stand up straight…fix your hair…don’t mumble. But wait. If we’re used to getting this kind of needling input throughout our young lives, why do we then fall apart later in life when we get less-than-glowing feedback? Why didn’t that chorus of criticisms translate into grit? Likely because we’re getting that input when we’re too young to hear it as anything but disapproval. We don’t see it as constructive advice from a loving parent trying to teach us how to present ourselves, but as disapproval. So naturally, later on, we experience the smallest criticisms as an indictment of our character.

This inability to tolerate negative feedback holds us back professionally, because it prevents us from taking in constructive feedback that could actually help us improve. I’ve had more than one guy tell me they avoid giving their female coworkers criticism—no matter how helpful feedback might be for the outcome of a project or situation—because they’re afraid it will “make them cry.” And unfortunately, sometimes they’re right. If that’s not a snapshot of perfection sabotaging us, I don’t know what is.

Just like we’re smart enough to know intellectually that perfection holds us back in all these ways and more, we’re also wise enough to understand that just being aware of these myths doesn’t mean the decades of training that went into them disappear overnight. As great as it would be to read a book and magically be free from the shackles of perfectionism, it doesn’t work that way. The real key to breaking free is by retraining yourself to embrace bravery, which you’ll learn how to do in Part Three. Then, and only then, does Perfect Girl 3.0 fade into the shadows, making way for the bold, confident woman to emerge.

The Truth about Perfection

Beyond all the myths about perfection lies one essential truth:

Perfect is boring.

We hold up the notion of “perfect” as the ultimate goal. No mistakes, no flaws, no rough edges. But the reality is that it’s the messy, unfinished edges that make us interesting and our lives rich. Embracing our imperfection creates joy. Plus, if you’re already perfect, where’s the fun in learning or striving? I’ve always loved the stories about President Obama playing basketball. He wasn’t great at it; he wasn’t even technically that good. But he loved it, and so he practiced and practiced—and he got better at both getting the ball through the net, and at being okay with being less than perfect. Training a new part of his brain felt satisfying—and that quality was part of what made him a great leader.

The most interesting people I know have flaws and quirks that make them uniquely amazing. My friend Natalie is chronically late—but blows in every time with a thrilling story about where she’s just come from. Daaruk leaves a mess all over our apartment whenever he comes to New York and stays with us—but has one of the most fascinating creative minds I’ve ever seen. Adita has absolutely no filter and will say whatever pops into her head; her observations may sting sometimes, but they are usually spot-on and helpful critiques. As for me, I know I love to be right and can be a little (okay, a lot) forceful about that, but that’s what makes me such a stubborn champion for my ideals.

If you think about it, it’s actually kind of funny that we even strive to be perfect in the first place, given how unfulfilling it is if and when you get there.

Bravery, on the other hand, is a pursuit that adds to your life everything perfection once threatened to take away: authentic joy; a sense of genuine accomplishment; ownership of your fears and the grit to face them down; an openness to new adventures and possibilities; acceptance of all the mistakes, gaffes, flubs, and flaws that make you interesting, and that make your life uniquely yours.