Top Highlights

• We maintain lists of all the things our parents, our ex-s, our former friends, and our ex-bosses did so, so wrong. We collect mountains of evidence supporting these judgments. But we are always innocent in our stories, victims of their inexcusable behavior.
• I no longer sat down with an executive or manager already on the defensive, already expecting them not to like what I had to say.
• I could see now the limiting story that had kept me from getting started on it: that my success depended on me doing everything perfectly. This story had me endlessly revising and polishing my writing and my products, never convinced that they were quite good enough.
• I had the experience of working harder and harder to try and “catch up” to an impossible standard I’d set for myself, but feeling like I was falling further and further behind.
• The piling debt and unpaid taxes weren’t the worst consequence of my unyielding perfectionism — it was the experience of myself as constantly stressed, anxious, self-critical, and resigned that it would never change.