How Perfectionism and Fear Make You Productive but Not Fulfilled
So let me out myself as a nerd. I went to Fan Expo last year with my partner. Like, oh my god, there was a giant sized Totoro! Excuse my unrelated tangent. I love Totoro. But I digress.
At Fan Expo, we entered into a GIGANTIC hall with seemingly infinite vendors. A mere nerd mortal would be overcome with excitement and anxiety…so much to see, so much to experience, where do we start?
I walked into the hall with a smug strut, because I had a plan. My 30+ years of Asian efficiency training has prepared me for this moment.
Forget basketball. Forget baseball. Forget hockey. This was MY SPORT…mapping out the most efficient route to maximize my experience by being the most time-efficient.
The plan? Starting in aisle one, we will walk from one end to the next to see EVERYTHING. Then we will move on to aisle two, then aisle three. Flawless victory. As I did my warm up stretches, I realized my partner was gone.
I scanned the crowd for her. And I saw her running towards the aforementioned giant Totoro. Disturbed that my efficiency plan was ruined, I told myself “Ok, so maybe we can start in that aisle.” So we proceeded to take some photos with Totoro.
After the photos, my mind was locked in. I was ready to continue my quest for efficiency dominance. But damnit, where did my partner run off to again?!
Around 3pm, we were done. We had a great time, and we were ready to go. And my carefully laid efficiency plan for the maximization of my experience was completely ruined. And I’m so glad it was.
Here’s a few things that I learned from my partner and from this experience:
We got to the giant Totoro early, before the line up. Had I followed my efficiency plan, we would have been stuck in line later in the day.
We saw everything we wanted to see. We were looking for posters and stickers. And my partner specifically targeted that area of the hall. This saved us hours of walking through aisles of things that didn’t interest us.
I usually leave these events completely exhausted. But this time, we were totally content to leave early because we had experienced all the things that we had set out to do. If I had carried out my efficiency plan, it would have been more exhausting and less enjoyable.
How Asian Immigrants are Trained to Be Efficiency
I grew up learning to be efficient. That was part of my “training” in my family. For many people, this kind of constant self-monitoring, achievement focus, and difficulty slowing down starts much earlier. It can develop when emotional needs were not consistently recognized, supported, or modeled during childhood. This is one reason emotional neglect can be difficult to recognize, especially when everything on the outside looked “fine.”
If you want to understand this deeper pattern, I wrote about it here: Signs You Grew Up With Emotional Neglect (Even If Nothing Traumatic Happened). It explores how growing up without emotional attunement can shape the way we relate to ourselves, our needs, and our emotions as adults.
Let’s take a look to see if your efficiency also effective. Here is how I define the two things:
Efficiency is a measure of how well you complete your tasks
Effectiveness is a measure of how well you achieve your goals
You can be both efficient and effective, if you are efficient at completing tasks that help you achieve your goals. But you can also be efficient and NOT effective, if you are efficient at completing tasks that doesn’t help you achieve your goals.
Being efficient but not being effective happens a lot more than we realize. In my Fan Expo experience, our true goal was to enjoy ourselves and checking out the posters and stickers. But once I got there, my Asian efficiency and perfectionism set in. And my goal of enjoyment was distracted by my need to be efficient.
Over time, this kind of pattern can become exhausting. When your mind is constantly trying to optimize, improve, and not miss anything, it becomes very hard to actually rest.
For many people, this is how burnout starts, not just from doing too much, but from feeling like you always have to be “on.”
Fear Makes You Efficient But Uneffective and Burnt Out
There’s also a lot to be said about fear. Or in my case, the fear of missing out.
Because of FOMO, I mapped out an efficient route to see everything. Part of the FOMO was related to my immigrant mindset of scarcity, and the need to make the most out of every penny. And if I paid for the entrance ticket of Fan Expo, then I have to make the most out of it by seeing EVERYTHING. Which came at the expense of my true goal – enjoying myself.
So, it is important to truly understand and recognize the fear that you experience. Because it shapes the effectiveness of achieving the life that you want to live.
Reflection Questions:
When dealing with your ineffective Asian efficiency, you can ask yourself a few things:
What is the true goal of this task at hand?
Does my perfectionism help me achieve this true goal? Or does it distract me from the true goal?
Do I even need to engage this task to achieve my true goal? Or is there another task that can help me achieve my true goal even better?
Continue Exploring the Patterns Behind Perfectionism and Overthinking
Perfectionism is often not just about wanting to do things well. It can be connected to deeper patterns involving fear, self-worth, anxiety, and the belief that we need to constantly improve ourselves to feel safe.
My guide, Why You Can’t Stop Overthinking, Even When Life Feels Fine, explores how these patterns develop, why they are so difficult to break, and how healing requires more than simply trying to think differently.
Hi, I’m Harry, a psychotherapist in Toronto. I work with 1.5 and second generation Asian Canadians navigating trauma, identity, and the emotional patterns shaped by family and culture.
If you recognized yourself in this article, I created a free guide called The Invisible Pressure to Be the “Good One” to help you understand why you overthink, people please, and feel responsible for everyone else, and why these patterns have been so difficult to change.
