Adam Grant on Perfectionism and Procrastination

Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris

According to guest Adam Grant, excellence does not require perfectionism, and rather than obsessing over the outcome of your work, there are better ways of measuring your own success.

Adam Grant is a frequent flier on this show and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 5 books that have sold millions of copies and have been translated into 35 languages: Think Again, Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves. He’s an organizational psychologist who has been the top-rated professor at Wharton for seven years. He’s also the host of a newish podcast, called Re:Thinking with Adam Grant, in addition to his other chart-topping podcast, called WorkLife.

In this conversation, we talked about:

• Adam’s definition of neurotic vs. normal perfectionism
• Why he thinks we’re seeing a rise in perfectionism amongst younger people
• Strategies for managing perfectionism
• A different metric for measuring the quality of our work
• The importance of finding the right judges of our work
• Reimagining our relationship to failure by setting a failure budget
• The difference between procrastination vs. what he personally suffers from: “precrastination”

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/adam-grant-547

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.