ineffective perfectionism/over ambitiousness?

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i am a diagnosed aspie and ocd 22 year old male. i have this tendency to daydream a lot and desire the best things, like a bmw or a really lucrative career and more often than not will not be content with average results. i guess im a perfectionist but not the kind that actually reach a high level. i just want the best and to be the best, but sometimes achieveing that seems so overwhelming that i dont even try or try then fail and sometimes get even more depressed. i guess my question is: how can i come to terms with the fact that there is a limit on what i can achieve and that i should settle for living my life and appreciating it rather than hoping to be wealthy and have the best of everything?

I can relate to this in a lot of ways personally.

To give an even simpler version of it (though yours applies perfectly to me), whatever my current fixation/interest/obsession is at the time, if it has things that need to be purchased, I'll research to death exactly what I want and why, but yet at least half the time its out of my league, and before I ever even get the one I want/need, (instead of a cheaper and worse model) I have usually moved on to the next thing.

When it comes to things closer to what you are talking about, I relate what I do to daydreams. I have worked out all the details, the whys the whens the whats of how to do it, but yet I never follow through. This helps me deal with this over ambitiousness, by sorting the thoughts i'm having as daydreams, and the things I'm taking action on as what I'm truly striving for. Don't know if that makes any sense, but it works for me (usually).

When it comes to what you can attain, and want to, realize that the goals you set more often than not should be attainable, break them up into smaller bits and set things as milestones along the way, and when you do pick that thing you don't know if it is truly attainable or not, realize that even if you don't get there, its the journey that says a lot about your efforts, not the destination.

Some things aren't going to work out, and when they don't, it can be so demoralizing that all your effort have been for naught, but if you look into the trip you took to get where you are, and what all that entailed, learning about yourself and your interest/goal/the world on the way, then you will see it is not wasted after all.

When I read the title of this thread, I knew exactly what it was about because I have been there!

I don't even need to elaborate because each of you has stated exactly where I am with this topic. The difference is that I'm a lot older than the OP and have seen a lot more failure and a lot more depression.

Do you often feel so much like an outsider looking in that you feel no connection with the rest of the world? I know I have! Maybe because we're not as able to deal with the social and communication aspects of life we focus more on the material aspects. What we (you/me) sometimes want is so lofty that we set ourselves up for failure. Because of the challenges I have faced, it has often been more comforting to focus on the things I want rather than being able to share things with others. When we express our desires, people will say that we're selfish people because (well, in my case) those desires rarely include people to share them with. It never occurs to us because we feel like outsiders looking in anyway.

I've seen in some peoples' siggys the saying that, "The best things in life aren't things." And this is SO true. Some of the things that have been more important to me as I have gotten older are finding people who can deal with me as I am - flaws and all rather than criticizing me and making me out to be some kind of selfish, self-centered, unemotional, underachieving failure who isn't worthy of basic respect.

Being around positive people has helped me to grow at my own pace and in my own way rather than according to someone else's ideas of who and what I should be. This way, the material aspect has become LESS important in my life and I have become more happy. What has made me equally happy is finding WP because of the level of identification it affords me with other people.

In the process, I have become more willing to share what I do have rather than dreaming about stuff I don't have and the ways and means of achieving them - which I might not be able to accomplish. And while I can't achieve this to some peoples' satisfaction, I do the best I can and direct my efforts where I know they will do the most good.

Hope this makes SOME sense.

Yeah, I used to try hard to work towards having stuff like that. What always frustrated me was that no matter how hard I tried people would always say "Could do it if you just tried harder" every time I couldn't quite get it on my own. I'd come home completely exhausted and it still wasn't good enough. After I figured out I could literally kill myself trying to 'try harder' (I'm not kidding, I had a doctor tell me I simply could not go back to work, I'd be dead within a month) for them I just gave up on it. Since I was getting the same feedback (try harder) regardless of how hard I tried I figured eh, might as well take it easy, not like anyone's appreciating any extra effort - or even noticing it, I'd have settled for noticing it.

I wish I knew how to tell you how to come to terms with it. Heck, if you figure it out I'd love to hear how to do it. I tried lowering my hopes for the future until I eventually just had to give up on it entirely, thinking about it just got too bad. Now I hope for something good to eat tomorrow, possibly chicken. I do like chicken.

Over the course of my lifetime, I have been able to do just about everything I ever wanted to do and to have just about everything I have ever wanted to have, but just not at the highest level attainable by other people with more money or better opportunities or whatever. For example, I have lived on a houseboat moored out in a nice harbour, but that boat had been a derelict my wife purchased for a small amount of money and then refurbished "just enough" (but nicely) to be able live comfortably and enjoy it ... and right along with other people and their fancy, high-dollar boats for which they are likely still paying. Then on land, we had a "poor man's motorhome" (an old school bus in need of a paint job) that went down the road just fine and took us to all the places we wanted to go without our having to be concerned about somebody denting it or stealing it. I do not mean to be saying everybody can have everything they want and go wherever they want to go, but I do know I would never have been able to do what I have done if I had thought I always had to have the very best in order to do anything at all and actually enjoy it.

Me too.

I don't define myself with careers or BMWs, so there's no problems with those things, but everything I do, I seem to need to do extremely well. When I write, I want the punctuation and syntax to be perfect, and the message to shake the world and change the way they think. When I'm with people, I want them all to be hanging onto my every word and showering me with praise and affection. When I wash dishes, I want them to be squeaky clean with no sediment on the cutlery (ever tried getting that in a hard water area?). I want my relationships to be a bed of roses from start to finish. When I watch a film, I want to understand every detail. When I buy a greeting card, I want the words inside to be what I'd say myself (fat chance!). When I perform a song, I want every note to be spot on pitch, and every phrase to take the audience to heaven and back.

Cure? I keep telling myself to look at the individual case and estimate how much of a shortfall is acceptable. Once I've noticed that perfection isn't really essential, it's usually easier to allow myself a bit of slack. And it's good to try to see that there's a bigger picture than the particular task....so rather than measuring perfection by looking at the individual task performance, I try to measure it as my total performance. That way, the imperfections of perfectionism become clear - 10 minutes spent over-nurturing one activity is 10 minutes of neglect for another task. Also, it helps to remain mindful of the essential futility of perfectionism - there's always another "extra mile" that you can go with this or that endeavour, like the proverbial frog jumping across the lake, you never get there.

I'm lucky because I have a job, so I can practice my balanced outlook on the work they make me do........so if the results get worse, those results aren't for me anyway, and my pay isn't related to competence, unless I really screw up repeatedly. I've handed in what I've seen as half-baked results, only to be praised for a good job. I always feel I may be losing my powers of diligence when I relax my standards, but it seems I could chop out half my brain and still do a more thorough job than anybody around me. There's no need to flip the other way and become a weak task-performer........it's just a matter of injecting some realism into the mix. Perfectionism has always been, and will always be, one of the things that defines me. I still believe that if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. And it's enjoyable to chase a high standard.

I know exatly what the OP means. I'm not into being super-rich or anything, but I want to be a decent webcomic artist & cosplayer (among other things), but my lack of talent is incredibly frustrating...to the point where I almost want to give up. However, I've kind of learned to settle for being mediocre because I can always say I did my best.



It still frustrates me that I'm not the best, though.