Overcoming Perfectionism: My Journey with the Binary Mindset

Abstract As graduate students, we are all aware of procrastination, overthinking, and anxiety. Even though we might not have gathered these concepts under perfectionism, there is a high chance that we might be seeking perfection and being perfect in our roles. In this paper, I am going to look at the concept of perfectionism, research methods and findings of it, and a method to cope with it that can simplify our life. Perfectionism has played a key role during my 17 years of higher education life. My experiences range from being in multiple universities around the world and in different majors. I have experienced perfectionism and its impacts as an engineering student. Looking at this matter closely, I reviewed the literature to better understand my experience. Thanks to the research behind perfectionism, there are multiple tools developed to overcome perfectionism. Such tools include creating mini habits to achieve the big goal and breaking down the goals into "bite-size" tasks. Binary Mindset suggests breaking down the big goal to as small as possible or until it is undividable and then start implementing them. The main focus of this paper is to showcase how I am learning to overcome my perfectionism through the Binary Mindset.