Perfectionism is typically a defense mechanism of some sort. This post is trying to fix all the damaged fruit springing from the roots of perfectionism, like trying to stamp out every ant instead of killing the queen.
Sometimes you grew up in a family with a harsh & critical parent, or rewards for progress were minimal, so a spirit of "well done!" is absent. Or maybe you had a personal trauma and the striving is an attempt to avoid pain ever happening again. Or maybe your personal search for significance in life so strongly identifies with something that anything less than perfection in that area reflects badly on you. Or maybe you have shame in your past and you're trying hard to compensate.
Whatever it is, perfectionism is not "solved" with a blueprinted flowchart or life system but by digging deep into a wellspring of grace and worth. For those of us who are Christian, we believe in Jesus' work on the cross as our source of unlimited grace and forgiveness, believing that God has taken care of the perfection gap of our failures. For the rest of the world, well I don't have an answer for you except you may want to take a trip through Paul's letter to the Romans.
Most of the techniques for “life philosophy” in the Bible are cribbed from Greek philosophy with a heap of mysticism stirred in to obscure it all. Just go to the source: the stoics and other Greeks. The dichotomy of control (serenity prayer) predates the Bible by some time, for example.
Sure, if you want to extract the various proverbs, there's plenty of practical and related wisdom. But the stoics had nothing to do with Christ, who is the target of faith in the Bible. Further, the stoics hardly had disciples who were completely broke and yet carried their message far enough to end up sawn in two, tarred and lit on fire, crucified upside-down, beheaded, gutted by swords, etc.
Indeed—the power of an idea is not fully captured in the words that describe it, but rather it gains full force in the stories and images that one associates with it.
Religion likes to try and corner the market on the human condition. To be fair even the Greek philosophers had some religious beliefs attached to Stoicism, but what survived of their works that is of use to us here and now was their more generic life philosophy, which is quite practical and beautiful in places.
Sometimes you grew up in a family with a harsh & critical parent, or rewards for progress were minimal, so a spirit of "well done!" is absent. Or maybe you had a personal trauma and the striving is an attempt to avoid pain ever happening again. Or maybe your personal search for significance in life so strongly identifies with something that anything less than perfection in that area reflects badly on you. Or maybe you have shame in your past and you're trying hard to compensate.
Whatever it is, perfectionism is not "solved" with a blueprinted flowchart or life system but by digging deep into a wellspring of grace and worth. For those of us who are Christian, we believe in Jesus' work on the cross as our source of unlimited grace and forgiveness, believing that God has taken care of the perfection gap of our failures. For the rest of the world, well I don't have an answer for you except you may want to take a trip through Paul's letter to the Romans.