Part of the problem is our culture lauds perfectionism as a case of someone caring too much or being too ambitious. That's not what it is.
Perfectionism is a failure to optimize across a complex goal space, settling, instead, on ignoring the difficult (and beautifully complex) prioritisation problem in favour of over-optimizing a limited set of easily-defined goals ("getting an A") over longer-run priorities ("being a fulfilled and productive citizen").
A long time ago I noticed a trend in job listings. Words you would associate with perfectionism (detail-oriented, accurate, etc.) are usually used with lower-paid and lower-status jobs. For example: admins, data-entry, etc.
Words you see in higher-paid and higher-status jobs often focus on strategy and planning in a complex goal space, as you note.
What's interesting about our education system is we focus a lot on precision and accuracy and not that much on strategy and planning. It seems like a system built to produce accountants and actuaries more than a new generation of entrepreneurs.
In all the people I ever hired and worked with over the years (data entry, devs, bizdev, sales or otherwise), attention to detail was the single most predictive trait for good performance. "Conscientious" is a better word perhaps. People who can't be bothered to understand how things work rarely produce amazing "high level" work either. It's a fallacy to assume you can "skip the details" IMO.
It's like inspecting a house: if you see shoddy plumbing and the walls are crooked and all the details are off, it is still possible the construction is amazing in all the attributes you CAN'T inspect so easily. But it's also quite likely the construction company didn't give a shit and were cutting costs left and right, and buying this house would be a safety hazard.
Also, you can pay attention to detail in strategic jobs as well. "Attention to detail" and "complex spaces" are not mutually exclusive.
Agree with the attention to details. Details are crucial.
But in my experience there is a kind of so-called "perfectionists" that won't work well in complex enviroments where:
1. they actually have to weight in the importance of details (and the cost of dealing with them)
2. Details aren't always obvious, and are easy to miss
So these kind of perfectionists might end up very focused on obvious details that don't matter that much and aren't useful to be taken care of in terms of cost-benefit relation, while ignoring not-so-obvious details that might actually matter more.
But I think picking the detail to be conscientious of is the trick.
Important details are just as annoying to check as less important details.
IMO, it's the ability to discern and apply elbow grease to boring things that matter, and walk away from unimportant things that really predicts good outcomes.
The phrase I use is "balance of cares". You can care a whole lot about a single part of the job. But to do a good job overall you have to care about a broad swath of concerns, else one of those unaddressed concerns will turn into a critical error.
Employees who are well-specialized can avoid betraying their lack of care about some aspects because they aren't even asked to think about that part of the work - they can go in for massive depth instead. But someone who wants to operate the whole business is in the position of "caring about things I don't want to care about". A lot of businesses are weakest where the owners are unable to muster sufficient sympathy.
I have literally no patience for the idea that attention to detail/conscientiousness is anything less than absolutely necessary at any level of an organisation.
Lack of attention to detail leads to screw-ups. Lack of attention to detail at a higher level just leads to bigger screw-ups. Lack of attention to detail at the top leads to colossal screw-ups.
Just think, for example, of RBS. No attention was being paid, certainly not at the top, to the details of all those supposedly investment grade CDOs. And then one day... BOOM! Turns out they were stuffed with junk and the whole shebang comes crashing down.
I also have literally no patience with people who describe themselves as "big picture thinkers" (thankfully this seems less prevalent these days; maybe I just move in different circles). You may as well skip the BS and say, "I am totally useless and ineffectual," because to me they're synonymous.
If you do anything without paying attention to the details you will do it badly.
(As an aside: I'm not here talking about micromanagement - you can't pay attention to all the details, obviously, at a higher level, but you can pay attention to the details that are appropriate at that level. This obviously only works if the people working for you are also trustworthy. If not, you clearly weren't paying attention when you hired them.)
I think you're leaning way too hard in the other direction. There's a balance that needs to be struck. A detail-oriented person may have an excellent understanding of where they stand today but have little thought for their trajectory, while a big picture person is the opposite.
It's rare for any individual to embody both aspects, so you usually pair these people up. For example: the strategic CEO + managerial COO. I've seen CTO/CIO combos with the same dynamic.
Just because someone resembles one more than the other does not mean the other is not just as important.
I don't disagree with the correct general claim but the specific example is much more of a control fraud problem... you can't expect someone to understand something if their paycheck next week depends on their careful avoidance of understanding...
I don't know. I may be interpreting this wrong, but having read "Making it happen" (which obviously has a bias) I came away with the distinct impression it was more of a lack of interest; very little of what I read would suggest that Goodwin was in any way careful about RBS's investments, even if that carefulness was manifest in avoiding understanding. It is just one perspective though.
Agree with the sentiment. Though I've often seen the by-the-book anal retentive types that work by rote and don't have a creative thought all day. You can't say they aren't detail-oriented but they are certainly of limited value.
> attention to detail was the single most predictive trait for good performance.
I think you just naively reprised the premise:
how exactly are you measuring "good performance"? The easily observable details they were good at attending to?
Of course, everybody wants an admin who doesn't make simple mistakes that cause outages, inconvenience, etc. But what about the one that provides an accurate asessment of the companies near-future needs vis-a-vis their trajectory, and recommends appropriate infrastructure upgrades?
"Conscientious" is one of the 'big five' character traits, somewhat different than attention to detail.
Though I think I understand exactly what you are trying to say an wholeheartedly agree.
"Conscientious" people are probably naturally more inclined to detail to make sure that their work is good.
But I would point out a small delineation point: some things are just a matter of focus.
Typists, some kinds of accountants - it's a matter of 'process focus' - that they are focused and attentive to their work, and make few procedural errors. This I think is a behaviour and can hardly be learned - and is often not very well correlated with 'creativity' or 'big picture thinking' at all.
But I really do agree - the 'overall more conscientious' types - no matter the trade - are the best people, unless you need star talent, but even then ... They care about outcomes, not just 'handing off' some thing, or 'fulfilling their narrow duties' etc..
You know what's paradox: older people tend to be far more conscientious: they pay their bills on time, more likely to do the things they say, less averse to going off topic with hyperbole, get along with others, punctual, they vote, they volunteer, etc. etc. - and yet there is a strong bias against them in some workplaces. Though it could be related to the idea they may not want to learn new things, or 'keep pace' etc..
I know otherwise highly conscientious people who miss emails, are are a little absent minded at times. You can't have that for someone who is managing your schedule. :)
In defense of OP I would say it isn't about "attention to details" or "no attention to details". Instead it's about which details you choose, because the potential "detail space" is infinite.
I would think that's just a representation of why people decide to hire employees.
Most employee roles start as assistant roles: someone hired to take the less-important work off someone else's plate, so they can concentrate on the more-important work. Assistants aren't expected to be better at their job than the person hiring them would be—rather the opposite—but are employed anyway, because they have a comparative advantage in doing that thing. They're usually valued by the company strictly less than the person delegating the work to them.
On the other hand, there are specialist roles: people hired specifically to do a particular type of work better than a generalist (e.g. the person hiring them) could have done it; or hired to do something a generalist couldn't have done at all. These people can extract a lot of value from a company if they know their own worth; people like lawyers, trade-workers, etc. can all command high contracting rates.
But corporations tend to think a lot more in terms of the assistant role than the specialist role. There are a lot of jobs in companies that started off as assistant roles, and then kept the low pay and low status even after they became specialist roles. Companies have a hard time noticing that the people in their assistant roles are actually specialists, as long as they don't actively revolt and point out their worth.
This is, I think, a big part of why you can get an average salary as a programmer at a BigCorp "through the front door", but can get a much higher salary from the same BigCorp by building a startup that they acquire. BigCorps hire assistants, but acquire specialists, and that informs how they think of you; what they're willing to pay; and what they'll employ you to do.
>Words you would associate with perfectionism (detail-oriented, accurate, etc.) are usually used with lower-paid and lower-status jobs.
It may surprise you to hear this, but I have encountered a lot of perfectionism (the negative kind) in software development.
I have struggled with perfectionism for essentially all of my life, and I find that the uncertainties of this particular trade (the lack of well established standards and the constant barrage of tool choices, to name two) make this a fertile ground for perfectionism hell.
I wouldn't be surprised if software engineering tends to attract perfectionists. Writing code requires a very high level of specificity - you have to think about all the ways that your code might not be perfect or there will inevitably be bugs. Computers are not particularly good at dealing with underspecified goals.
While that's definitely true, there's also a great degree of "many ways to skin the cat."
What I've found is that while engineers will often focus on getting the implementation just right, they will just as often get stuck on murky architectural decisions. All things considered the decision is murky because the alternatives aren't clearly better, so the correct path is "pick one, try it, reflect later" rather than "debate hypotheticals until an impasse."
I've seen many engineers who are good at these murky architectural decisions, and I've also seen otherwise detail oriented engineers lock up a team on the debate around architectural decisions for so long you could have tried both ideas by then.
Interesting point. I suppose that decisive perfectionism is the goal then. This is definitely more difficult when the scale increases, and the time between deciding the path and seeing the results increases.
I've been working on a project involving some highly optimized C++ code, where the smallest architectural mistakes can cause serious slowdown. My architectural strategy thus far has been to 'just try' all of the decent options and then pick which one is the fastest. It's been working out well, but luckily my code is ~1K lines and the cost of doing this is minimal. (fun fact: template classes >> polymorphism in terms of speed, also, cache yo trig functions)
In contrast, I worked on a partial refactor of a fairly large (~150KLOC) code base, and the 'just try it' approach was definitely not an option due to the person-months work required to even make a small dent. That took quite a lot of thinking to figure out a reasonable path forward. And a lot of diagrams...
I think it's about perfectionism in the user experience vs. perfectionism everywhere else. This is the difference between a Steve Jobs-like quality focus and the kind of irrevant perfectionism that often plagues software development.
Getting into programming helped me isolate my perfectionist tendencies. As long as I have something I can obsessively polish, I can relax in other areas of my life.
There might be a reason for that: if the modern corporation is built upon breaking work down into ever-tinier units, hierarchically, then the vast majority of positions available will focus on performing one very specialized, tightly-defined task with exceptional accuracy and consistency.
And then because there are fewer positions that involve strategic planning at the top of the pyramid, the relative status and financial compensation for those positions will be higher. The causality runs from hierarchy -> job descriptions -> pay scales & status -> educational system, not the other way around. As all the folks who graduated college/gradschool with loads of student debt but no positions available know, it does no good for everyone to train to be at the top when the top only has so many positions available.
It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the world would look like if we got rid of hierarchy entirely. YC was built on this premise [1]; it will be curious to see if it actually succeeds in eliminating hierarchy or if it just replaces one set of hierarchies with a different one, with different folks at the top.
> What's interesting about our education system is we focus a lot on precision and accuracy and not that much on strategy and planning. It seems like a system built to produce accountants and actuaries more than a new generation of entrepreneurs.
You're spot on (nearly). Seth Godin will tell you[1] that it's a system quite literally built to produce compliant workers for factories during the industrial revolution: https://youtu.be/sXpbONjV1Jc
[1]: as will many others. But I like how he puts it in this video.
> it's a system quite literally built to produce compliant workers for factories during the industrial revolution: https://youtu.be/sXpbONjV1Jc
Maybe initially it was, but I can't see how a today's college-prep / AP sequence prepares kids for working in a factory. In fact, the opposite has happened: too many kids are going to college when many would be better off financially learning a trade.
That seems a bit off. The Industrial Revolution was considered to have taken place from around 1760-1840 per Wikipedia, but compulsory education began in places in the 1500s, and public schools started popping up in the 1600s. The reason for this is actually quite well documented: early Protestants, dissatisfied with the Catholic clergy's stranglehold on religion at the time, wanted to encourage literacy so that everyone could read the Bible.
Indeed, the primary reason that the stereotypical factory worker in the early industrial revolution was a girl was that girls were not yet required to attend school.
I would totally believe that deliberate elements of compliance were added at some point, but those seem to have mostly appeared in the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries: clearly well past the Industrial Revolution.
Interesting observation! I'm not disagreeing with you as I don't know what is the best approach to education is. However, with my nephews, they need to learn accuracy before they get to higher level thinking. Accuracy and speed is the foundation. When their dad reviews their homework, the excuse the nephews most often give is "but it's just a simple mistake". Too many of these simple mistakes.
>> Words you would associate with perfectionism (detail-oriented, accurate, etc.) are usually used with lower-paid and lower-status jobs. For example: admins, data-entry, etc.
Except for the traditional "professions". Everyone wants their doctors, lawyers and pilots to be heavily 'detail-orientated'. Such professions bake in a degree of perfectionism. (I'm suffering it now as I have trouble even posting an online comment without going over it six times for spelling and grammar.)
Very interesting observation. This resonates well with me and puts into words something I've been contemplating for years. I used to describe myself as a perfectionist, but today I'd rather be described as a pragmatist. You can't ignore critical details, but neither can you be so focused on getting every detail perfect that the big picture ends up worse.
This is typical when designing software: There's limited time and resources available, and you often need to make a difficult tradeoff between the time taken to create something that's (perfectly?) maintainable long-term, and saying "enough is enough, we're losing money every day that we don't release". I get the impression that people are rarely able to keep both of these concerns in mind. Many skilled developers ignore the long-term opportunity cost of taking a long time to write "perfect" code, whereas many managerial types ignore the long-term technical cost of shipping poor-quality, difficult-to-maintain code.
> It seems like a system built to produce accountants and actuaries more than a new generation of entrepreneurs.
Perhaps that's because (a) nobody knows how to educate people to become entrepreneurs, and (b) the kind of people who will make good entrepreneurs are the kind of people who won't be very happy in a one-size-fits-all education system like the one we have.
An education system that would promote entrepreneurship would one that focuses on group projects and encouraging students to take risks with new ideas. At the moment, there is too much pressure and no incentive for students to solely focus on objectives besides grades.
> An education system that would promote entrepreneurship would one that focuses on group projects and encouraging students to take risks with new ideas.
I'm not sure an "education system" could do this. The whole point of having a "system" for education is uniformity: everyone learns the same things. There is some variation, but not much, because no "system" can handle much diversity. But the whole point of entrepreneurship is diversity: everyone tries different things.
> What's interesting about our education system is we focus a lot on precision and accuracy and not that much on strategy and planning. It seems like a system built to produce accountants and actuaries more than a new generation of entrepreneurs.
Because it is? That's not necessarily a bad thing, the world only needs so many entrepreneurs.
This might be true in principle, but in practice I would say our current world suffers from a huge undersupply of entrepreneurs, not an oversupply. Far too few people see the purpose of their jobs as creating wealth.
Yes, but don't forget that you are expected to progress from the lower paid job to the higher paid one, so it should be no surprise that the respective job descriptions will be different for the junior and senior candidates respectively.
You have to learn to be a good practitioner before you can progress to a leadership role. The junior-role skills are omitted from the senior role, not because they are no longer required, but because it is taken as read that the senior candidate has already acquired them.
Education focuses on the production of blue collar workers in poor areas, white collar workers in affluent areas and on business decision makers in expensive private schools.
Years ago I read the results of a study comparing teaching approaches in the listed environments, with a very clear conclusion about the intentional training of execution vs. creativity vs. leadership and big-picture thinking.
by the time you get to the higher-paid and higher-status job applicants, you hope that the low-level requirements of job performance - detail-orientedness and accuracy - should have already been met.
I hadn't heard that before, but I like that way of thinking about it. It reminds me a bit of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Good grades might be a good measure of a student's performance, but when we focus on optimizing the grades themselves, they become less useful as a metric.
When I was in high school, there were some students who wouldn't take a class if it wasn't weighted, because it would bring down their overall GPA; even if it was an interest of theirs, they were worried that the effect on their class rank would hurt their college admissions chances.
I wonder how much of that "grade performance inflation" isn't due to changed externals but just due to the ever built-in ways of inter-generational parenting-evolution:
It doesn't matter that you are the only sibling graduating, what matters more is that once you've gone PHD you'll (openly/subconciously) put your expectations on display for your kids to see.
As a college-grad, how likely would you tolerate ("welcome"), your kids leaving education with a high school diploma?
As a phd, I'd be perfectly fine with my kid(s) finishing with a HS diploma. Why? Well 1st, it would be a lot cheaper for us! 2nd, I wouldn't at all be worried as long as the internal drive is there to further their own education.
A lot of people have the idea that once formal education stops the need to learn ceases. In fact, the need to learn should never cease because progress can always be found. What changes is that once formal education stops, learning becomes self-driven. So whether a person has a HS diploma or a phd is irrelevant if their internal drive to progress has stopped.
This is a good point, but I think the "magic" of perfectionism is that it hides the upper bound: if you get a 1598 out of 1600 on the SAT, then you're quite smart; if you get a 1600, then who knows, you could be infinitely smart.
Nobody ever asked for my grades. There are plenty of (quality) PhD programmes out there that aren't that competitive to get into. Or did you just mean a top-10 US Ivy League school, because those PhD's are the only ones that count?
Being ambitious and willing to work to get As and get into a top program is different than being so obsessed with it that you punish yourself if you get a B on a paper (even if you get an A in the class).
I'm not so sure about that. Most people I've met who actually got into PhD programs weren't particularly ambitious, and didn't have a precise idea what they wanted to do with their prospective research careers. They'd just been raised as academic perfectionists and gone onto the "obvious" next step in academic perfectionism.
I got into a Top 15 MBA program with a sub 3.0 undergrad GPA. Just means I had to show progress and initiative post-bachelors, do well on my tests, and have a good reason for it in my essays in interviews.
I applied to a mid-tier research institution for graduate physics and I believe they liked the amount of research I did as an undergrad, which amounted to every summer having a research internship and my last full year being advised by a professor. No publications came from undergrad btw.
As a grad student I did lag a big behind in classes but I joined a research lab my 1st year and published some well-cited papers in Physical Review Letters, a top Physics journal[1]. In my grad application I reaffirmed my passion for research as being the reason I wanted to attend a graduate school.
After that I took a postdoc at a top-tier international research lab and again published well-cited papers in Journal of the American Chemical Society, another top journal[1]. So from the grad school's perspective, I should classify as a 'good' hire :).
I think p-hacking is a form of BS. So a lot of PhD students, post docs, and tenured researchers are engaged in BS. Then there's impact statements for research topics that obviously have no societal impact. And yet statements get written and funding is allocated.
So it's not clear to me what your challenge is trying to get at. BS is rife everywhere. Maybe you meant, "try being a researcher without having to resort to BS".
In Japan perfectionism is not encouraged. The rough translation kanpeki shugi (完璧主義) will bring up more ways to fix it than become it on the first page of google.
What the Japanese culture and other Asian cultures similarly encourage however is discipline (majime, まじめ), and the proper way (matomo, まとも）. This means parents instill time management (basically they force kids to take the time to study) and procedure (study environment, tools, focus, resources). This is the true cultural advantage.
With regards to suicide, this too can be correlated to culture with statistics, but it has nothing to do with perfectionism. I would attribute it more to their naivety when it comes to mental well being, and to self sacrifice. In other words, they think it's okay to suffer and sacrifice their mental health far past the safe line, and fare more than most would permit in the west. In Japan, your "self" takes a back seat to the onus of being the majime and matomo Japanese citizen.
The answer is to learn time management, discipline, and procedure, but while staying healthy, both physically and mentally. That's what OP's father did. He made sure his daughter's mental health was okay. That's what parents ought to do, and he deserves all the credit in the world.
But is it? I admit, eastern cultures are fascinating to study but I believe if you pick an average citizen of Japan and compare him/her with an average person of some western country you'll find both persons despite their different backgrounds surprisingly similar.
You may criticize how math is taught in the US and argue how, for example, Korea does a better job but in the end both countries excel at delivering high tech goods. Overall, there is not so much difference here.
So I wonder whether we just create differences by looking for them.
I'm not so sure what you're defining is completely different. Doing things the "right way" in Japan and other east asian cultures has more or less the same effect as trying to be "perfect" in American culture. The effect is both cultures encourage the individual to act in a manner they may not accept themselves. The difference being that in a conformist culture the avenues for self expression are limited by culture and society. In an ambition oriented culture the concept of "failure" has the same damaging effects.
This isn't to say that both traits, conformity and perfection are inherently bad, instead we should be teaching the purpose or reason to do so rather than blindly require the behavior without justification.
Conformity and perfectionism is the western translation, but they are inaccurate, for the same reasons most translations are inaccurate. They are translations by appearance only. As a culture perfectionism is shunned, and individuality is encouraged. The translation would have you believe the opposite.
The cause lies in their extremely specific moral values as a society. They call it the Japanese spirit (nihon no kokoro, 日本の心) and it embodies discipline, proper procedure, mastery, sacrifice for the greater good, among other things. A good member of society is one that aspires to be an iconic Japanese. And when an entire culture behaves in this manner, they do appear to conform, and to value perfection, and to even act as one. But they're aligned only because they uphold similar values and share common goals.
The Japanese are conformist as much as a good Christian wants to be a good Christian. Christians don't conform to Christianity. They embody it, and hence become similar as a result, not as their motivation.
They are perfectionist as much as an aspiring athlete wants to be like Mike. They aren't looking to master Perfect or become Perfect. They just want to be like Mike.
And we don't say kids playing basketball are conformist for all wearing Jordan or Steph Curry gear, nor do they wear it to conform. They do it because they love those players (just as the Japanese love their country).
Another great Japanese word is kodawari (こだわり). It's the obsessively picky and uncompromising soul of a craftsman. This too could easily be translated as perfectionism, but "perfection (kanpeki)" is not their goal. "Ideal (risou)" is their goal. And kodawari is an emotion, whereas perfectionism is not. And "ideal" is a dynamic and personal target, where as "perfection" is not. Perfection is for amateurs.
Do you think there is more uncertainty about the future today than there was, say, 50 years ago?
Anxiety about school and grades may be an outcome of an increasing sense of uncertainty. The less confident one is about the prospects of the future, the more safety net they will desire. Getting the best possible education is perceived to be the best safety net short of a trust fund.
One major difference between 2016 and 1956 is the perceived likelihood (for Americans, anyway) that you'll be able to work on an assembly line, or, a customer support group, or that your white collar job will be done on-shore.
My advice to my kids was to seek a profession that could not be sent overseas, one way or the other. Such as dentist or lumberjack :-) But of course, we now have hair transplant robots which bodes poorly for both professions.
What it means to me is that navigating the rest of the 21st century requires thoughtfulness, sound analytical skills and a sense of agency. People have to be able to understand the relative impact of all manner of dynamic systems in the world, not just technology, but economics and government, and the way they all interact. Then, they need to plan how to do to stay relevant and execute their plan.
Learning that seems like a lot to ask from a public high school education these days, yet, I believe I learned it 40 years ago.
>Do you think there is more uncertainty about the future today than there was, say, 50 years ago?
1956 would have been the height of the cold war, a time when people thought a nuclear war with the Soviet Union that that would extinguish all life on earth was inevitable. It would have been just after McCarthy's Red Scare and the end of Korean War, and in the early phases of what would become the Vietnam War.
I wasn't alive in 1956 nor have I studied the 1950s enough to make a valid judgement, but I graduated college this year and high school in 2012 and the attitude was definitely one of uncertainty. If you didn't get X grade or Y internship (or any random thing like that), your chances at a good career were well, uncertain.
A lot of people paint the 1950s and early 60s such that you could do okay in high school and not go to a 4-year college and still manage to provide for a middle class family. Can anyone who has studied or otherwise know if this was true? The only thing I can be certain of is that this is only true if you were white.
> If you didn't get X grade or Y internship (or any random thing like that), your chances at a good career were well, uncertain.
You left out one thing: if you do get X grade or Y internship, your chances at a good career are still uncertain. There is no magic bullet.
> A lot of people paint the 1950s and early 60s such that you could do okay in high school and not go to a 4-year college and still manage to provide for a middle class family.
To an extent this was probably true in the US, but the reason was something temporary: there was a huge economic expansion going on in the aftermath of WWII, with new markets being created, and many industries were willing to basically overpay their workers in order to increase production and capture market share. In the US auto industry, for example, most new car sales in the 1950s and 1960s were genuine new sales--families who had never had a car before or who were adding a second (or even third) car they hadn't had before. In that environment, yes, a person with a high school education can have a middle class income, because the cost of his labor is a minor expense compared to the potential value to be captured.
In the current US auto industry, by contrast, almost all new car sales are for replacement of previous cars--the market is saturated. That means there is a huge price pressure being exerted, and hence a huge pressure to drive down wages and to automate jobs that used to be done by human workers in order to reduce costs. In this environment, a person with only a high school education is unlikely to have the skills that would make them valuable enough to a company to be able to earn a middle class income. (Note that I said "unlikely"; it's possible to develop such skills without a college education, but statistically few people do.)
Does that mean things are more uncertain now? I'm not sure. I said the situation in the 1950s and 1960s was temporary; it was also not the same in all industries. So I don't know that one can make a general statement either way.
There certainly are magic bullets. Look at any software engineer who has ever interned at Google. For anyone else, the hiring process is uncertain, chaotic, and basically random. Success is a function of your past performance, your appearance, the emotional reaction your interviewer has to you, your interviewers mood and frame of mind during the interview, how stressed you happen to be that day, etc. There are exceptionally strong candidates who are rejected by the Google process and poor candidates who make it through. The latest thing in the Google interview crapshoot is a new emphasis on GPA - I've never (in the past two years) heard of someone with less than a 3.5 even being considered for an interview and they ask for a transcript with the application. There are lots of exceptional candidates who push themselves into hard subjects, work on personal projects, and lead on campus that are ignored because of that magic number. On the other hand, once you have that Google internship, every other tech company is falling over themselves to interview you and extend an offer - I've never heard of a Google intern not getting ab excellent full time offer months before graduation.
Group affiliation helps, too. On my campus there is a very strong and old computing interest group with a strong alumni network. Every year, company recruiters do interviews directly with that group of people before even considering applicants at the career fair.
I both got a google internship with a well sub 3.5 GPA; and have since then gotten both accepted and rejected at equivilent tier bigCos with that (and other "prestigious" establishments) on my resume and nonetheless saw a good mix of clean and chaotic hiring processes.
What I'm trying to say is there is NO silver bullet; as other sister comments say, it's a crapshoot even with your cards all in order. I believe the aspects you list of the "normal" level of chaos are quite accurate, my tailoring to your statement is merely one that the leg up helps less than you seem to imply. (from both my and peers in similar situations's anecdotes.) I make this statement not to be pessimistic but to be optimistic. Someone without G on their resume shouldn't feel helpless, they are not alone, and they are not in an impossible or insurmountable situation. The only "real" path I've found, regardless of who or what background you have, is to just keep bullheadedly driving towards your goals and building the skills required to do this more effectively. Everything else for me has been ephemeral and less impactful. (I would note, you're right re: network, but I bucket that more under a skill you can build than something implicit, since for better or worse, networking is a skill one must practice in modern professional life as one mechanism to support ones stability)
That's just an attempt at legalized illegal age discrimination. Given the statistical average grade inflation of a fifth of a point per decade, my 3.4 in the 80s is worth a 4.0 in 2016 but if the real intention is to avoid hiring people over 30 for whatever reason, it'll work as a strategy.
> To an extent this was probably true in the US, but the reason was something temporary: there was a huge economic expansion going on in the aftermath of WWII
Not only that, the economic expansion was tilted in favor of America as there was little competition from Europe and Japan, as they were rebuilding in the aftermath of WWII.
This sentiment, while important to remember if you ARE a perfectionist, also sounds like a really slippery slope similar to something like eating right. "Well if I just eat when I'm hungry" you'll find you're frequently "hungry" if you're a certain type of person. That said, if you're a certain type of person, "not being a perfectionist" could be a great avenue for never pulling yourself out of your slump.
"I messed up at school" Well, I'm not a perfectionist so that's fine I'll just keep at the same pace. TURNS OUT, that pace wasn't so useful. "I am failing Chemistry" OH WELL. I'm not a perfectionist so it doesn't matter.
You can see how this can be a problem as a mantra to a certain type of person.
That is how I lost way too much weight. Got hungry, wasn't able to eat right then by the time I was able to eat I was no longer hungry. I gradually taught myself to eat very little and was very ill because of it.
Exactly, it depends a lot on the kind of person you are. I know my daughter is not a perfectionist. If I offered to reward her if she did badly at school, I'm pretty sure I'd be buying her gifts every week.
She does well in school by the way - because we constantly nudge her to. We don't put pressure on her for perfection though, just for decent results.
These parents were able to send their kid to NYU, an extremely expensive private college with almost no financial aid.
Many of the parents who put insane pressure on their kids to succeed academically do so because they can't afford schools like NYU- they have to get into more competitive schools that offer more financial aid or lower tuitions.
> These parents were able to send their kid to NYU, an extremely expensive private college with almost no financial aid.
What a ridiculously tangential thing to say without a shred of evidence.
Do you have any insight into their financial circumstances? While NYU does indeed have relatively stingy financial aid, there are plenty of students who receive lots of financial aid. (Heck, I got a full ride. If you assumed that my family was rich because I went to NYU you would be dead wrong.)
You have literally no insight into their financial circumstances and should not be lobbing such insinuations around.
20% of NYU students receive Pell grants. Assuming all NYU students are wealthy is like assuming all Americans are white.
That sounds pretty anecdotal, only because (also anecdotally) I was surrounded by many, many wealthy kids at my school whose parents put insane pressure on them due to the perceived status of telling others that their children go to "insert well-branded school here"
I don't doubt many lower income families pressure kids to get merit scholarships, but it's not true that higher income families don't pressure kids as much.
In fact, I'd argue (anecdotally also!) that the American upper middle class has the most pressured kids. It's not always to say that "my kid goes to Harvard" but rather it's some strange attitude that parents have one they reach a "not wealthy enough to not work, not poor enough to get state financial aid" stage.
Which does not necessarily imply that money is being well spent...UCLA costs less than half [0] of what NYU asks, and has a smaller endowment per student. What I read from those numbers, is that UCLA gets less money and does more with it.
That's all well and good. One can criticize NYU's financial aid policies, but to assume that an NYU student is wealthy without knowing anything about them is preposterous.
I have experienced both types of approaches from my family. As a kid attending school in Ukraine we had classes 6 days a week and hours of homework each day. My grandmother was a teacher before retirement - I remember her having some very harsh words over my late nights doing math homework in 3rd-5th grade (I can't remember why but in my school there was no 4th grade, everyone in my class went from 3rd into 5th). I just could not get long division for the longest time - there was yelling and tears.
When my family (not including grandparents) moved to the U.S., my parents noticeably loosened up. I think it was because they didn't feel like they had to chase after me to do well so much anymore. They were kind of caught off guard by the school system. Math was the most important, but the stuff we were learning in math at the U.S. school were things we learned long ago in Ukraine so to them it looked like I was doing well and needed no chasing. In truth I was only doing well because my grandmother made me drill math so hard in Ukraine in prior years!
Unfortunately when in later years what we learned in American schools started to overtake what I had already known from Ukrainian schools, the relaxed attitude began to show in my grades. Perfect scores slipped to mid-lower 90s, then to Bs, and even some Cs. I remember failing one test - still can't remember why, even my teacher was shocked. I ended up graduating high school with "above average" grades, but nowhere near as good as they would've been had my grandmother kept charge of my learning.
While I don't miss my grandmother's yelling, I do wish my parents were a bit more strict back then (and at the same time realize that my lack of motivation in school was entirely my fault). I turned out ok, but feel like having a stronger grasp of math and more structured study habits would've been very beneficial later in life.
One reason I'm not a perfectionist about my kids' homework is that a lot of it is crushingly uninteresting. I have two kids, and I work with them often on homework, especially math. I like to look for interesting ways to approach problems, to show them there are ways to do things that aren't a series of steps that need to be followed with high levels of exactness. Sometimes the teacher heaps on so much basic arithmetic that there's no time to do both. if it comes down to a choice between investigating interesting ways to go about a problem or chugging along with a mechanical approach, I'd rather investigate a problem in greater depth. That may mean a worse grade, but it's a balancing act. To be clear, I always advocate respect for the teacher in terms of civility and politeness, but I do want my kids to independently assess the learning value of their assignments.
There have been assignments that seem to be little more than an exercise in penmanship. I have reflected on how teachers used to (perhaps still do) force kids to write a dull sentence 100 times as punishment. In that sense, at times, my kid's homework is nearly indistinguishable from a punishment.
Just to be clear, this isn't always the case, my kids have also had good teachers and interesting assignments as well.
I went through K-12 in a different East European country, and it was mostly all drills and rote memorization. Our history teacher would read his notes, which would have a paragraph on any given subtopic (battle/kingdom/person). About 4 times a semester he would do oral exams, which took about 2 periods to go through 30 kids, so about 3 minutes per person. His question was one or two words which was the title of the topic, and we were expected to recite the paragraph from his notes word for word. Each word wrong one grade point down. We might as well have been reciting digits of pi.
Overall the most useful studying technique I took away from this is math drills, which came in handy even in a run of the mill American university; the trick is to just do the same kind of problem over and over again until you internalize the intuition; it's kind of the wax-on-wax-off learning something you don't realize you're learning until a while after all the work is put in.
I've no idea what to do for my kid when time comes. I don't want her to drill stupid, but I would like her to learn to work hard.
Coming from the other extreme where I had very little control of my life I'm not sure strict parents yelling at you a lot is a better motivator.
If anything I'd get an emotional response to do the opposite even if rationally I knew I should be studying or preparing for something.
Some autonomy to have your own life is preferred. It's with some irony that I largely have the job I do now because I ignored my mom and messed around with linux instead of constantly preparing for medschool. Though I did end up doing pre-med reqs in addition to CS anyway.
My dad always believed that if you're going to do anything, you should try to be the best at it. In terms of grades I certainly have not seen a positive effect, but I think the reason is I don't value professional education as much as passion learning, which for me is much more rare. The sentiment however has been instilled in me, and when I discover something that I enjoy doing its hard for me to be second place.
> My dad always believed that if you're going to do anything, you should try to be the best at it.
This is a hard balance. I have found that being very close to the top in many different things you do while only being "the best" in one or two is far more productive and efficient.
Often the amount of effort you need to expend to be #1 instead of #2 is exponential. Sometimes it makes sense, but most of the time it doesn't.
And, if you are very consistently #2, you often wind up with the top spot more often than you would expect because #1 stumbles.
>My dad always believed that if you're going to do anything, you should try to be the best at it.
My dad would say similar things.
Boy, how wrong he was. (Fortunately, he was not pushy about it.)
In my years, I have learned the value of making mistakes, and not pursuing the path of minimal mistakes.
I have also learned the value of quitting. Always trying to be best in what I pursue would mean I would often pursue the wrong goals.
(Tangentially, "Finish what you start" ranks highly on my list of really bad advice).
I have also learned the value of "good enough". There are things I passionately want to be the best at. There are other things that have no value for me beyond being "good enough". Our dad's advice would ensure we either do not pursue the latter, or we aim for perfection in it to the expense of other endeavours.
Simply put, the advice is good only if you have unlimited time. When you get old enough and can reflect on your past, you'll get a better sense of how much time you have left and what you can accomplish in it. That time is very precious, and it may be in your best interest to be good at many things, as opposed to the best at a few (and poor at the rest).
>(Tangentially, "Finish what you start" ranks highly on my list of really bad advice).
I tend to agree. People have told me that they were only doing something because they started it and 'don't want to be a quitter'. My response is always that the concept of a 'quitter' doesn't really exist to anyone but high school football coaches.
In the words of Kenny Rogers, "You've got to know when to hold 'em, Know when to fold 'em, Know when to walk away, And know when to run…"
My parents - especially my mother - was big on both the, "If you are going to do something, you should try to do it well" and "you should finish what you start".
Which led me to not starting some things. I'm still learning when some things are "good enough". I still have the drive to do things "correctly". Which is a real pain when you need to speak a foreign language because you moved!
Interestingly, however, I kind of embraced the opposite of "finish what you start" - to the horror of my mother, I'm sure. I tend to work on bits of projects at a time, especially with hobbies. The downside is that occasionally I have a half-finished project that never gets finished. The more I learn to work with it, however, the more I tend to simply have projects (especially art) in various stages of finishing, but they all get finished. Overall, I find my finished projects are better for it.
> if you're going to do anything, you should try to be the best at it
I think this is an admirable heuristic in certain circumstances. It's important to note its perversions.
If you're measuring value by social ranking, you're incorporating others' values into your discovery process. This makes it difficult to do anything groundbreakingly unique. How can you be first if you're the only one racing?
(Then again, genius versus madness is a retrospective measure.)
I think it's also flawed when applied to "anything". Realistically, you can only become "best" at a handful of things, even under relaxed scope. You cannot be best at all skills you require to function. However, it often suffices to be reasonably good. Be reasonably good at cleaning. Be reasonably good at cooking, or accounting, or programming, or exercising. Then take these things off your mind, and divert your attention to those skills that comprise your focus.
But then the phrase just becomes generic advice everyone gives and provides an easy scapegoat to save face. Don't change it. Or if you must, you could at least dress it up a bit like Feynman http://www.basicfeynman.com/read_letters.html ("If you have any talent, or any occupation that delights you, do it, and do it to the hilt. Don't ask why, or what difficulties you may get into.") You can weasel your way out of failure with "well that's as good as I can be", it's harder to weasel out with "well I went at this at full force but failed anyway." The latter can also provide some satisfaction that you went as hard as you did, whereas the former just provides resignation.
(It's similar to Facebook's "Move fast and break things." It's a great phrase precisely because it's not the same generic advice everyone gives. There are times where it doesn't apply, that's more important than the times it does. Universal for all time advice sucks and is bland.)
That motivation may have been contextually valuable for Ms. Chia, but speaking as a former teacher, the majority of American students would probably benefit from parenting that sits further down toward the "Tiger Mom" end of the parenting spectrum. Not off the deep end, of course, but definitely further than at present.
How much do you think parents should be involved with kids' homework?
My wife and I got tired of the daily battles with our 3rd grader over homework. Until a few days ago one of us would review it at home and point out any mistakes. The response to any mistake was a fit of rage. Our daughter gets extremely frustrated whenever we point out she did something wrong.
So we decided to try a different approach. We told her we won't review her homework anymore, unless she explicitly asks us to. Her end of the deal is that at the end of the week she has to read her teacher's feedback and take note of what she got wrong, and figure out how she could have gotten it right.
I'll preface by saying that most issues surrounding homework are in general very debatable, and even the best educational research (which is not great) suggests a lot of age and subject dependent policy variation. And even the individual teacher and his or her relation with your daughter are confounding variables, not to mention whatever lessons in values and character building you and your wife might have, so this answer comes with a lot of unstated speculation on my part.
It sounds like the original interaction you had with her consisted purely of negative reinforcement. That rarely produces the long term results loving parents want, even in very obedient kids.
Your second approach is fine for a child who is either mature or has significant intrinsic motivation. A weekly assessment is a good frequency, but you're leaving it entirely up to her to report, and she seems to have the option to give you no feedback. Can you trust her not to slack off and surprise you with an unacceptable grade at the next test? Maybe you can; I don't know your child. Maybe she's naturally bright in the subject, or can at least pull her act together and study hard enough when test time comes around. Do you expect 100% mastery on each assignment? Not every mistake reflects a gap in knowledge or conceptual understanding, and the smartest children are often the most acutely aware of when they're penalized for careless errors or unnecessary formalism. That's not to say diligence and tolerating unliked procedures are bad lessons to learn either, but a good teacher can distinguish from the nature of the error what kind of feedback to give. I realize I'm raising more questions and factors instead of answering directly, because I'm trying to convey that parents should grow more sensitive in general to the academic behaviors and values their rules encourage. Be ready to iterate on your strategy (maybe 1 month of weekly feedback) make sure you're able to get reliable feedback. If you wanted a more proactive suggestion, why have her demonstrate her knowledge around homework at all? Typical 3rd grade psych. development sees children still interestep in showing their parents their accomplishments to seek their approval across the board. What if when you see her in a good mood, and not engrossed in something else, like around the dinner table in casual conversation, you ask her to teach _you_ something new she learned in class that day? (Maybe start with other subjects if the homework one is too sensitive.) Feign surprise and gratitude, as if she really taught you something new. Having to reexplain content knowledge in one's own words from memory is a very powerful retention technique.
In American culture education-related jobs are to be aspired to and vocational-related jobs are looked down upon. Just observing, not propagandizing.
Therefore school vocational activity is socially inferior to school educational activity.
The best (only?) way to teach vocational skills is to practice them. Carpenters do not learn the dovetail joint by reading books but by making a hundred or so by hand. It works pretty well for vocational skills such as carpentry, arithmetic, and coding. But, vocational work is what social inferiors do at school.
Kids on an education path should not be tainted by experiencing prole life such as homework therefore Americans generally don't like homework for social class reasons.
Adding to the fire, higher math is educational, lower arithmetic is vocational grinding. Kids are going to spend most of their school time in "math" doing vocational grinding. Vocational work is prole and we are all socialized by our culture to hate vocational work so obviously the result is "I hate math". Meanwhile people who haven't learned arithmetic in 30 years think of all of math as educational experiences in topology theory in grad school or whatever and mistakenly think kids math is just like their last grad school math class, all deep thought and reasoning and education, therefore vocational grinding is inappropriate, although ironically its the best way to learn that early subset of the field. Its simultaneously true that grinding homework like a prole is an inefficient way to learn topology in grad school and a good way to learn addition in first grade.
All you need to do to change American attitudes toward homework is upend the entire socioeconomic system and how culture views the socioeconomic system. Until then expect to hear a lot of "my kid gets too much homework" and "I don't like math". And people outside American culture will continue to be confused, and American kids will generally graduate somewhat innumerate compared to other cultures that have different hangups. Which results in a lot of crooks selling snake oil that'll fix everything "silver bullet style" if only we put bibles in school or fill in more scantron tests. And much like programming, WRT school and learning there is no silver bullet.
If my parents bought me a present after I had received a bad mark in school when I was a teenager my twisted mind would have interpreted that as a catastrophe, "my god, they really do think I have failed and now they are even trying to bribe me to be better, they must be desperate".
I'm with you, I would be staring in the mirror having an existential crisis. "What the heck? Are they giving me a thinly disguised participation trophy? They hate participation trophies?!?"
I guess know your audience applies to parenting as well as performance.
By the time her father said this to her, she obviously already had strong intrinsic motivation. Her parents just did a good job of managing it.
How to create intrinsic motivation is a harder question. There is some research that parents can create it by setting and clearly communicating expectations from an early age. But it's not conclusive.
We're clearly deep into nature/nurture territory here.
I agree with the sentiment and hope to raise my children without tiger parent pressure. Though graduating with a psychology degree and studying copywriting seems to make for a tough life ahead. I certainly don't want my child to "have to break [their] neck to make a living", but it seems like that might end up being the case here anyways.
I seem to be saying it even more, but once again I must state that perfect is the enemy of good.
Often people strive for perfection in their grades, to the detriment of their finances, friendships, and personal development.
It happened to several people I know, they'd lock themselves away and study for hours instead of being social and forging relationships (which in the real world outside university are a lot more important than grades).
At the end of the day, everyone gets the same Degree (unless you're doing honours, where there are grades). It doesn't really matter what your grades were if you can network yourself into a job instead.
As others in the NYT and HN comments have said, the best parenting strategy seems to depend on the psychology of the kid.
My parents were more or less in the pussycat camp, which led me to put an enormous amount of pressure on myself as I felt like they just said that to be nice, because they knew I was "gifted" and would ultimately do "what they really wanted". It wasn't good for me mental health wise.
The work ethic correlation with suicide at the end of the article in a common sense way is sort of sound but it also begs the question: "maybe some cultures are more comfortable with suicide" (a->b) instead of idea of the author has "since asians work harder/have higher expectations more asians must commit suicide" (a->b->c). Obviously the author has the stats that asians are in more prestigious schools but that doesn't necessarily mean they are pressured more or that they are consequently more likely to commit suicide.
For example you could have devout catholics that have the same work pressures and stressors but would never commit suicide (I don't know if that is true but I'm not sure about the authors position either).
I noticed I got downvoted and now I'm terrible nervous I offended someone. I wish downvoters would comment (I have never downvoted anyone on any forum without a comment). I don't mind disagreement of opinion even if it deserves downvotes but I'm concerned if I offended anyone. All I meant is that the expectation of parents of the culture reference in the article might not entirely be the cause of the higher % of suicides.
In fact from the stats, being engaged in the AA community tends to reduce the likelihood of suicide. That aligns with what I've seen myself from my parents and my friend's parents.
But that goes against subtle hinting of the article of parenting being the cause of suicide. If it were parenting wouldn't suicide be high earlier as well (before college)?
Maybe it isn't cultural within families but peer social groups that are setting the bar too high. I'm arguing the stress may not actually be from the parents but the desire to fit in with others in the group.
Then I misunderstood your toplevel comment as "Asians are more comfortable with suicide culturally (insert samurai references here) therefore we can expect higher rates of suicide". My evidence against that was that AAs don't actually have higher than average suicide rates and that being part of the culture reduces suicide rates.
Yes that is why I was deeply concerned that my comment was interpreted as "samurai reference".
I really regret mentioning catholics as I could see how it easily confuses even more.
My overall point was the author seemed to be connecting too many dots and thus in my mind might make it less likely to be true.
Originally I contemplated bringing up the the stereotypes of cultural conformity (as in some cultures
are influenced by groups and deeply desire to be part of the group/conform) but this is a dangerous topic (regardless of being PC as it can quickly get heated). Peer conformity would certainly be less points to connect (cause/effect) than parents causing college aged AA's to commit suicide (regardless of ethnicity).
My parents and collegiate experiences were much like the author's. I would call them asking for advice, only for them to ask about how I'm pursuing happiness. That openness and lack of using perfection as a goal allowed me to pursue first (pre-)medicine, then (pre-)graduate school (Biochemistry), and finally Computer Science throughout college. After four years, I found myself with two majors (Biochemistry and CS) and can only thank my parents for not pushing me in one direction, as I've never been happier as I am now developing software in the biotech space.
In my experience, asian parents tend to vastly underestimate the importance of genetics that predetermine a child's strengths and dispositions. Kids that are born with some combination of great working memory, processing speed, and abstract reasoning ability will do fine at math and science with an order of magnitude less effort than others. For these kids, being pushed to perfection in school can be beneficial. For others, the expectation that they need to do as well as the other kid on the SATs or in engineering or medicine or whatever often leads to the problems the author describes (suicidal ideation, depression, etc...). Sure, everyone should be encouraged to try their best but there needs to be more focus on cultivating everyone's unique strengths. Often times the people getting perfect SAT scores aren't studying any more than others (in my experience, less), yet asian parents will tend to believe that their kid's imperfect score is due merely to a lack of effort.
Interesting - to me, it seems like asian parents have recognized that genetics have less of a role than you might think. When I look at math contest results (in the US), asian kids are completely dominating. Either asian kids are just inherently better at math (probably not), or their parents have realized that they can instill the work ethic and studiousness to produce these results even if their kid isn't a natural genius.
Yes, preparation makes a big difference in math olympiad but most of those competing at a high level are already very talented to begin with. The problem is when a parent expects their kid to achieve similar performance when they don't have the raw skills. By attributing no role to inherent ability, blame is always put solely on the child for not trying hard enough. Even within a given family, you'll notice that some kids are better much more talented than their brothers or sisters at a given task, and the difference is not really preparation (especially since these differences can often be seen at a very young age).
You're describing a fixed vs. growth mindset.
This applies both to your current perception of people (notably children), and also your perception of yourself when you're a child.
I believe in the growth mindset - to explain your example of sibling dominance, I believe that a child's mindset heavily influences their ability to learn. If it has a positive effect, the preparation they do is both more effective and more bountiful (this is usually classified as stubbornness / determination). But preparation _is_ necessary to perform a task at a high level. When you hear of 'prodigies', they often started whatever it was - math, music, sports, programming - at a very early age, and reaped the interest.
Why not both? Both preparation and inherent ability are important. I find it implausible that everything can be explained by "mindset." Perfect pitch is a good example, it's a useful ability and cannot really be developed through training. Other factors are more subtle but are also fixed.
This phenomenon reminds me of what it's like to send PRs to a project, hoping it gets approved and merged ASAP... Then being given push rights, and suddenly finding yourself on the other side of the fence: hoping PRs are reviewed very rigorously and merged only after much scrutiny, to keep the code quality and maintainability up, scope low, etc.
I had to tell my son something similar as he was terrified of getting detention at school. I told him if he got detention, I'd get him whatever toy he wanted.
This is where I really wish there were a good dataset of SAT scores of non-asian kids adopted by asian parents. Of course that also runs into the issue of asian-american parents who adopt might be different than the tiger parents.
When I was a 3rd grader in South Korea I had the hardest time solving the simplest arithmetic problems. My teacher used to keep me after hours as a punishment until I was able to solve them. I think it was literally something like "2+3-3+2+2-100+39". You could say that I was pretty much in the opposite end of "exceptional" on any subject — was NEVER serious about school back then and completely ignorant of education (probably didn't even know what this meant).
To me school was a place where I went to hang out with friends for 7 to 8 hours, and yet, I don't remember my parents doing anything about it, not even a light discussion about my education. This went on for several years even during my early school years in the U.S. (my family immigrated in the middle of my 3rd grade year).
It was only when I started watching stargate and other scifi movies/tvshows that I got interested in science and technology, and thought "Hey, maybe I might try this thing called education so that I can do things that these guys are doing in the tv!", but realized that I was still extremely subpar at math and english (not to mention i even sucked at korean - got worse now, but i think i got a little bit better at english), and pretty much everything else, flunked algebra in high school and mostly Cs and rarely Bs on other subjects, and miraculously A in PE hahaha.
At the time I knew I had to do something about it, so I asked my parents for help, but sadly got close to none. They hired some tutors for me but it never worked out (you could really tell, the tutors were frustrated at how stupid I was). At some point I realized that I had to take this matter into my own hands - had to start all over from the fundamentals. At which point I actually started reading books, writing, memorizing, solving (math problems), I had to pretty much make up for what people usually learned in their primary school up to jr. high years. I eventually managed to do well in math, improved speaking/writing/reading in english a little bit, trained myself in scientific thinking, got into physics at a university and now I'm working as a software engineer. Buried in financial aid debt... :(
The thing about people though... is that we forget quite a lot of things we learned 10 years ago, but the most coolest thing nowadays is that as long as you have a way of getting information into your head, your education only ends at your last breath. Although when I was growing up I hardly saw my father, and my parents never intervened in regards to my education, they were there for moral support, life lessons, and the list goes on. I think that in the near future if I were to have children of my own, first and foremost I'd hope to see them growing up healthy, and that they'd find something they're interested in earlier in their lives, but I'm not sure if it will help to be strict with their education, we'll see.
Perfectionism is a failure to optimize across a complex goal space, settling, instead, on ignoring the difficult (and beautifully complex) prioritisation problem in favour of over-optimizing a limited set of easily-defined goals ("getting an A") over longer-run priorities ("being a fulfilled and productive citizen").