MSP97 [] Perfection: The Search for the Peerless Profile.

This is a download from the FM 89.9, the Business Station. This is Tech Talk made possible by TM1. It is one Friday perfectionism. It's the default position for MSP.

And once again, Matt wrote this into the intro. But it's our pursuit of perfectionism is a good thing or a bad thing. Are we setting goals and expectations for ourselves that are impossible to achieve and making ourselves sick as a result? No stranger to imperfection is MSP's Matt Amadeus and Matt.

We keep hearing about ideas like perfection trap, but is it real and thus the perfection trap exists? Well, hey, Jeff, as we said off my before the show, I haven't had time to look any of the notes for today. So I'm talking about perfection and it is going to be imperfect. I'm not going to stumble a lot over my words as I just did.

But no, I mean, the perfection trap, whether it exists, that's probably the hardest question of today's show, because it is something that's completely subjective. Certainly, and I don't think it's the first time we've discussed the subject on the show this year, we are seeing an increase in the numbers of people with mental health issues, particularly people in the generations we define as millennial and digital native. And while perfectionism isn't generally accepted as an illness in and of itself, it has been closely linked to things like eating disorders, OCD, anxiety, depression, and my lack of shaving. It does seem that people with those conditions are more likely to demonstrate perfectionist traits than you would expect to see in the general population.

So what are we talking about today? Like, how are we framing or defining perfectionism? Well, like I said, I mean, perfectionism is very hard to define in this clinical sense. And it doesn't seem to be a clear consensus even amongst psychologists as to how we define it.

Although many of those psychologists, you see, I'm stumbling over my words again, they're becoming alarmed about the potential mental health time bomb that might be ticking away in the next generation or the generation after. So the closest that we have come to a consensus on this issue is the 30-year-old multi-dimensional perfection scale. I really like the sound of that. I would like to be on the multi-dimensional perfection scale.

It sounds very retro-tech as well. It sounds like quantum computing as well. You know, I can be perfect, not only in this dimension, but in other dimensions that you can't be in experience. But the test grades participants for a series of 45 questions on a level of one to seven.

And of course, there is more than one type of perfectionism. Which are? Well, they're a self-oriented perfectionist. These are the people who set themselves ridiculously high goals and then feel miserable because they can't achieve them.

Oh, like yourself. Well, you know, you're saying it's a joke, but it's probably a fair assessment, to be honest. I've left one line of work behind me because it was a line of work that left a lot to chance. So even when things were at the most successful, there were always small failures within that structure.

And I found that very hard to cope with. You know, I couldn't take pleasure in the successes because I was only able to concentrate on the things that failed. And then there are other oriented perfectionists. Yes, who hold others to ridiculously high standards?

It sounds a lot like you again. And it explains why I don't have stuff anymore and I work largely on my own. Not because I can't find anyone good enough, which is what you often hear from entrepreneurs who suffer from the same delusions as me. But because it's simply unfair on people who are actually doing a great job that you're unable to comprehend or appreciate.

And the final one, socially prescribed perfectionist? Well, this is where perfectionism dovetails with MSP's own set of interests. You know, these are the people who feel an overwhelming pressure from other people that they have to succeed. So that might be from bosses or colleagues, that's people at me, friends or family members.

And increasingly, it's rooted in this digital sphere, not just in social media, but also in the way we communicate. And many of those forms of communication are, of course, sure in context. Hence the reason why you advocate for using e-mails? Yeah, because I have the very British habit of writing one word or one sentence replies to e-mails.

And I've been told many times that in Malaysia, when someone writes you a 500 word e-mail, it's a little rude to reply with yes, no, noted or sure. I usually counter that it's even more rude to expect me to read a 500 word e-mail that had the waffle bin size would actually fit into less than a paragraph. Which relates to e-mail using what way? Well, when I'm writing yes, no, or sure, I need a way to reassure the recipient that I'm not being rude or sarcastic.

As I've said before, because of my intrinsic Englishness, people think sarcasm is my default setting. Yours is? Precisely. So emojis allow me to let other people know that I actually mean what I'm saying.

If that's all right with you, Jeff, smiley face. Don't start that hashtag on fleek stuff. We've had more than enough of that horror show lesson. Dan, when I was about to shout out to my bay, I think I'll stick to my old droughs instead.

I generally have no idea what he's talking about. Look, why should we view perfectionism as a negative? And I just corrected Jeff on that question, which is showing exactly the traits that I'm supposed to. Not be manifesting.

But it is a really good question. We're told that it's good to have goals. It's great to be motivated. And a little dose of that is, of course, healthy.

You know, have a little of that perfectionist streak, and there are benefits that come with that. People do better academically, and certainly they seem to shine in the early parts of their careers. But in larger doses, it can actually be debilitating in what sense. Well, we've all felt that feeling, you know, we've started a project, whether it's a work project or for fun leisure.

You know, we have great intentions. We have all this enthusiasm. But that sense seems to weigh in over time. And perfectionism can be a little bit like that.

You start off really strong, but you're shooting so high that you can't help but keep missing the mark. But now, well, that's one side effect, but it also stores up stress and anxiety. So even when you're performing really well, you're setting up that expectation that you have to do better next time. And on and on and on.

But still, is this any different from what we've seen before? Well, according to a new scientist piece by Helen Thompson from mid-August, what we're seeing is a transition in the type of perfectionism that manifests itself in society. So not only are we seeing more manifestations of perfectionist traits in younger generations, the way this is distributed is shifting to study published by the American Psychological Association earlier this year, and conducted by two British-based academics, looked at the data of more than 40,000 of those multi-dimensional perfection scale surveys in the US and Canada between 1989 and 2016. And that showed that there has been a shift towards this idea of socially prescribed perfectionism with almost two thirds of the respondents in 2016 testing higher in the socially prescribed condition than the same groups did in 1989.

And presumably the reasons for this change is why we're talking about it. Sharp is about, as ever, smiley face. A study at La Fé University Hospital in Spain on twins found that there is actually a genetic component to perfectionism, which is quite surprising. But that is still only part of the story.

The same research team also found that environmental factors are very important in influencing and determining the type of perfectionism that people develop, which once again brings us back to this kind of technology show territory, because what we're seeing are essentially pressures of our digital age. Uncertainty. Well, yes, partly, you know, we're seeing this disconnect in people's lives. They're being forced to spend more money on their education with no promise of a job at the end of it, living costs arising, health care costs arising, the pressure of looking after aging or sick family members who themselves don't have the financial resources to underwrite their long-term care.

So when you get a job, there's this immense pressure to succeed and progress. Yeah, those jobs may turn out to be transient or temporary because companies consolidate and danceize, and AI is also making your role and those years of education increasingly irrelevant. And yet we're still under the same pressure to be the best version of ourselves that we can be? Well, yeah, this is where we kind of jump away from the science and into my highly unscientific observations.

But you know, look at the language that people use now, finding my bliss, being the best version of me. They're all superlatives, and it's unrealistic to be aiming so high all of the time. Like a Faisal review of your life? Well, exactly.

You know, we're being sold on this idea that everything should be perfect. Gig economy workers are dismissed if their ratings fall below 4.0 something. I mean, imagine if you had to keep up a 90% plus grade average at school. I mean, it's absolutely insane.

But that's what we're expecting people in low paid gig economy jobs to do. We mentioned on a show earlier this year that millennial workers were willing to actually take a pay cut in order to get a better job title because we place all this importance on the outward trappings of success. Oh, and by the way, Jeff is now a vice president of microphone technologies. The perfect in stuff.

Yeah, you know, more and more you see people behaving more like the influencers, the way their posts are structured and posed, the way they write the posts as well, the long, long description about how blessed and humble they are by the poached egg they have for lunch. You know, we're all buying into this curated perfection. And I've mentioned before, you know, one of my old school friends only post pictures of wiring jobs. He's done his electrician.

And I love his feed because it's so daft. It's messy. It just has pipes and wires in it. But in its way, it's just as curated as the perfect feeds.

But it turns the concept on its head because he's often working in, of course, these dark and dirty construction. It's meta. Well, you know, that's another word that people should stop using because again, it sets up unrealistic expectations. No, I mean, his feed is just silly and funny.

He's taken genuine pleasure in his work. And even though he's only getting half a dozen likes on his posts, you know, it's this idea that it's a very real waste of time. But that's what social media is. It is trivial, but somehow we've blown it out of all proportion.

You know, we've codified its signals and forms and we're building this trap for ourselves. It's an impossible goal that can only bring us stress and anxiety and possibly even physical harm. After the break, Matt will explain why good enough is, well, good enough. Stay tuned, PFM, T9.9.

You're listening to Tech Talk made possible by TM1. Begin Fan Moments, BFM, 89.9, the Business Station. You're listening to Tech Talk made possible by TM1. And we're back before the break, we were talking about some of the problems that perfectionism is storing up for future generations.

So, Matt, why is good enough? Good enough. It just is. Move on.

Smiley face. I've got to stop doing this really irritating. It's even irritating me. No, this is where we get into the paradoxical part of the show.

Oh, and this is where you start telling us about the magical mystery that is the future? Well, I guess so. The bit that relieves me from having to back up what I'm saying with empirical proof or truth. As we talked about before, the break, we're seeing this big uptick in people feeling social pressure.

And I don't want to stick this all on the social media companies because I think it is much bigger than that society itself is changing. On the one hand, we see older generations who see these changes in terms of some definable other, someone or something that they can put the blame on. I don't want to look at what Brexit is doing to my own country, not that I can really get a handle on that. But the problems they're rebelling against are largely nothing to do with the UK's membership of the European Union.

In what sense? People are worried about the same things. They've always been worried about jobs, security, health, education for their kids. And it's easy to place the blame for all those things on an influx of foreigners, but it's not necessarily true.

We see big corporations doing everything they can to avoid paying tax or banks acting in economically destabilizing ways, securing the knowledge that central banks will bail them out if they take on too much risk. And as a result, countries' tax spaces are dropping. And that forces them to adopt these austere economic policies, which in turn lead to underinvestment in areas like health and education and increase the worries and anxieties of normal people. And while work becomes more uncertain?

Well, yeah, you see historic lows in levels of house ownership in countries like the US, people who haven't had a raise in 10 years, no comment from Jeff here, watching their real incomes erode and their debt burden pile up, companies merge and rationalize. People are desperate to keep their jobs, let alone think about improving their lives. And these are all great ingredients for this wave of populism that we're seeing in a number of countries around the world. But surely the people are also benefiting from new technologies and the jobs that come with them?

Well, in the past that has always been the case. You know, and you can argue that the consumer explosion of the 20th century, while certainly imperfect in a lot of ways, hugely benefited the world in terms of spreading wealth and developing these kind of affluent middle classes. And that they pulled hundreds of millions, even billions of people out of poverty during that time. But in the last 20 years, especially, we've seen that wealth start to accumulate towards this smaller top percentage again.

And this isn't an economic die-drive. I am going to stick broadly to the technology aspects. But, no but, you know, we've mentioned the World Economic Forum report from last year on the impact of artificial intelligence on a lot of industries. And we laughed at the fact that at the top of the list of people unaffected by artificial intelligence will be the CEOs and the general managers that the report was targeted for.

And it's true what you say about people benefiting from these new technologies. But we're also seeing an increasing skills gap because you can't easily transition from a job in a fast food outlet or a call center to work in programming AI unless you've had a lot of training. But more than that, we're also seeing a change to the traditional model of technological progress. That the new technology screen more jobs than industries they replace?

Well, yeah, I mean, look at the more traditional global economic giants. Look at the private, the unchemical company, CarGill. Now, that employs over a hundred thousand people. IBM employs 350,000 people.

Facebook employs just under 40,000 people. WhatsApp services billions of customers with only 50 employees. So startups tend to adhere to this lean and mean philosophy when it comes to employment. But that means at some point the global economy is likely to start shedding more jobs than it adds.

You talk to a lot of startups, Jeff, you know, that specialize in automation on tech talk and various aspects of your shows. Companies that do business process outsourcing, cloud services, AI chatbots for customer services, logistics automation, all sorts of outsourcing. And we are also seeing a wave of innovation coming into the employment support sector. And those positive development services on us?

Of course, but it's easy to forget that what's good for business owners isn't necessarily good for employees. I can set up a retail company that has no employees at all. I can use a big company like Amazon to warehouse and ship my products. I only need to order in stock once I have the orders to go out.

I can use a simple e-retail site to sell. I can have AI running my customer services segment. I can schedule and automate all my ads on Google and Facebook. Sure, you know, I might not be selling millions, but I really don't have any overheads.

I have no physical offices. I'm not holding stock. My store is still open 24-7. And there are no pesky people to slow things down or make things more expensive.

The perfect solution. Well, other than the fact that we can't all be business owners, and I think that feeds into this perfectionism trap we're talking about. There isn't room for every single person on the planet to be an entrepreneur. We can look at all those amazing images of the Insta star who spends his or her life travelling to exotic places and only asks that you buy the dubiously sourced jewelry and sandals that they're hawking in return.

But those are not scalable business ideas. In what sense? Well, in that the market can only support so many people selling sandals or sarongs or Hawaiian shirts which seem to fill up our Instafeeds. There are only so many pastries that we can eat.

For one thing, it becomes a really inefficient business model because there's so much duplication. And we already hear how hard it is for new brands to stand out. So what if every single citizen in the country was running their own, possibly even multiple automated businesses? How would anything stand out at all?

It's like going to one of those street markets where every stall is selling exactly the same thing. It's got to a point where it's beyond competition, it gets to a point where we're just looking at subsistence level existences. And what's the point of having all of this knowledge and this technology? If so many people have to regress so far economically as a result of it?

But surely we should be embracing automation in general. Well, we should. A lot of the solutions we see now help avoid drudgery and repetition and that can help to make your human stuff. I always sound weird when I say human stuff.

It can help to make your human stuff a lot more productive. In industry, as I've said on the show many times, it's great that machinery and robots mean that heavy industries like mines can now be operated by remote control. Human beings don't need to toil in those dark, dangerous and healthy spaces anymore. But that's not much comfort if you had a well-paid job as a mine worker and suddenly you're in a minimum wage gig or service economy job.

You know, health aside, you'll probably feel that you've lost a lot more than you've gained. How does this relate to perfectionism and the idea that what we're doing is good enough? Because a lot of us are just chasing sprites. You know, we're running after something that isn't only intangible.

It's actually disappearing in front of our eyes. And I guess this is where I get to the really downbeat part of the show. Oh yeah, because it's been up so far. Well, yeah, that's kind of the point.

You know, you're fighting a rising tide. Doing better at your job is not going to be enough to change anything. And that's what I mean when I said good is enough because we're going to see increasing competition for fewer and fewer jobs. So, I think that an argument that drives perfection, that to land those jobs we need to be even better.

Well, I think that's where the future map part of me kicks in. You know, I don't think it's really going to matter in the long term because those jobs are going to go to enhanced people. They're going to go to wealthy people who have AI brain implants or folks who've been genetically tweaked. For most of us, I'd say stop stressing so much.

Enjoy life a bit more. The uncertainty of the future is probably not going to land in your favor. So you're saying we should just give up? No, not at all.

I mean, I'm saying stop pushing yourself to achieve the impossible. What's that added? That slogan? Impossible is nothing.

Well, yeah, there's nothing to achieve by aspiring to be impossible. Aspire to the possible instead and ask what kind of future it is that you want and work to try and shape that future. Isn't that a contradiction? You're saying that the technology companies are introducing is inevitable.

So how do we shape the future? Well, as I said earlier, you know, the 20th century free market model brought billions of people prosperity that they had never experienced before. But that doesn't mean that that economic model is the best choice for the 21st century and beyond. And I'm not sure we even have the economic or social model of the 21st century yet.

And partly that's because billions of people are sitting around assuming that companies have all of the power. They don't. They just want to make you think they do. For example, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg outlined this week what the company will do to stop Russian and Iranian interference in next year's US presidential elections.

But it doesn't address the fact that Facebook takes money for political advertising. So in part, it's a self-created problem because Facebook has placed itself at the center of an information exchange that is largely unrealistic due to its scale to actually police. So how do we take charge of that direction that things take? The same thing I've said on the show before, you know, elect politicians and representatives who understand the digital world and its implications, who know that there's a difference between Android and iOS.

Don't believe people who tell you that only they have the answer, which is me. It may be that the in the future, you know, people will simply have to work less. So we'll need to figure out how to provide for billions of people who don't have work. It's not going to be perfect.

It's not going to be utopia and it's certainly going to be a messy transition. But I think it is going to happen. And it's not really worth making yourself sick and anxious over. So, as we said before, embrace the uncertainty.

Be flexible, but figure out what your anchor points are because you don't have to be the best version of you all the time. You can be the version of you that records a podcast without having bothered to shave because you know that nobody can see your whiskery face. There you go. There's no point in searching for perfection.

Just be good enough. Be as good as Mac. Alright, there we go. I think I'll say.

I'm saying a really low bar for people right now. Or really high if you look at it differently. I don't think you should look at it differently. We'll be right back with Geeksquaps after this.

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