Dead At 30 For Not Following Instructions
Everything I do has to be done according to my idea of perfection and I am seriously unable to submit work whether it be a deck during an internship, or a project at school that's not perfect in my eyes. Of course, if I am submitting work, it's perfect in my eyes so it must be near some level of perfection in the receiver's eyes which is great. Except, it's becoming a serious problem of mine now.
I'm seriously inefficient at everything now because everything must be perfect. For example, during my internship I was asked to do some high level research on a specific industry on a word document. Instead, I created a full fucking blown industry report on PDF. I'm talking about your favorite BBs analyst report type of shit. It could have seriously served you as a handy book on the industry in case you weren't sure of something. All the person wanted was a high level summary....
I can't keep pulling that type of shit. I've stayed in the office overnight plenty of times to pull this type of perfection that I seek so much of. I've easily pulled over 50 all nighters in the past 1-2 years. I'm 20 years old and at this rate I'm gonna be underground by 30. Why? Imposter syndrome? Does it matter why? How do I get over this?
Doing something other than what you were asked for is the opposite of doing perfect work. A general industry report is the opposite of a high level summary. Maybe the first step here is realizing that doing a bad job is called doing a bad job, not being a perfectionist. Second step is getting experiencie on what people's words actually mean when they want you to put it on a word/spreadsheet/powerpoint.
Honestly I used to have the same problem and now I always ask my boss to tell me how she imagines the final product any time she asks for an analysis or report that is even a little ambiguous.
do you think your boss usually appreciates your asking? could you maybe provide an example as well? appreciate it.
I know she thinks I'm smart and a top analyst as she has told me so multiple times so I doubt she sees an issue with those questions. She has never directly told me she appreciates those questions (these are 1-2 minute conversations anyways) but there are times when as she starts answering she realizes that her original vision had small defects that she then tweaks with me and I'm sure she appreciates that those issues were found out early instead of me mindlessly building something she wasn't going to need anyway.
As an example when there was talk about possibly increasing the head count of a certain department, even if I had little to do with that side of things (she leads multiple departments), I was asked to build a simple model to predict how many people we'd need there. So I asked how she imagined the final product and she proceeded to list what she wanted as inputs, outputs and the visualization of the final product. Note that this was just like a 30 second explanation so it was really a rough idea that allowed me to get started quickly and not really a step by step guide. Here the most useful insight was knowing what she wanted as inputs, because here there were dozens of variations I could have chosen for the inputs, and even if I had chosen something similar to what she wanted (that we'd then have to revise) it was better to be clear on which she wanted to save us that revision.
to underline the other poster - it seems like what you did in that example, and other examples, is assume “well they said x, but I BET if they had Y it would be so much better. It is a type of hubris, you are assuming you know better than the superior what would be the right thing to produce. I find that many college kids do this because their grading structure is linear: longer report (generally) = better grade.
This is NOT the case in the professional world. You are given tasks with the understanding you’ll be done in a certain time frame and produce a certain product. Yes, “perfection” is expected, but you aren’t going for perfect, you are going for...whatever you think the superior should have asked for.
finally, I would talk to someone about ADHD. One of the prime symptoms I was told about before I got diagnosed was ‘Hyperfocus’, where you go crazy on something for hours and don’t think about anything else. Frankly, your anecdote reminds me of myself.
Think of it this way: you wanna be perfect right? Good! Then don't be short-sighted enough to be perfect in your career and completely fail in everything else.
The key to perfection is perfecting the balance between killing yourself on a task to get the best outcome and being a lazy worker who just wants to get it done. It's a yin and yang thing.
Try to perfect your body, try to perfect your level of stress, try to think about deeper meaning, try to learn things outside of banking so you can talk with seniors. Try to do random stuff that makes you happy so you don't think of life as a chore.
At the end of the day, you have to just say "ahhh well" and submit. Yes you will make mistakes. Maybe you won't be a top bucket analyst if you act like this. But it might make you a better and more likeable human being. I know what I'd rather be.
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