I sometimes watch someone do something badly and feel genuinely puzzled by their confidence. They publish writing that is still rough. They start a business before they seem to know what they're doing. They draw badly and show people anyway. They play an instrument where other people can hear them, half a beat behind and reliably out of tune. They make awkward videos, apply for things they're half qualified for, sell work that isn't very good. They hand themselves titles nobody awarded them — expert, mentor, founder — and seem untroubled by the distance between the word and the evidence.

And somewhere in me there's a reaction that isn't particularly generous, because from the outside none of this reads as confidence. It reads as delusion: a failure to perceive something that appears obvious to everyone else in the room. How can you do this so badly and still put it into the world? Sometimes the thought is harsher than that — how can you do it this badly and not wonder what the hell is wrong with you? Though the question underneath is probably simpler, and less flattering to me. How are you not ashamed?

For a long time I understood this as a difference in standards. Some people care about quality and some apparently don't. I've come to think that explanation misses most of what's actually going on. What looks like exceptionally high standards is often just a very low tolerance for being seen while you're still becoming competent, and the person who seems almost offensively unashamed may have an ability the perfectionist lacks entirely: they can survive being mediocre long enough to get good.

The other position has a cost too, and it's a quieter one. As long as the work stays unmade, the imagined version of it stays intact — a comfortable arrangement, and a more expensive one than it looks. What complicates the whole thing is that the irritation isn't always wrong. Some people really are overclaiming; the title really isn't backed by anything. Which is what makes this reaction so hard to audit: it's correct often enough to pass for discernment when it's doing the work of defence.

High standards aren't the problem

Perfectionism isn't the same thing as wanting to do something well. Research on it usually splits the trait in two. There's the part that sets demanding standards and wants to perform, and there's the part that worries constantly about mistakes, doubts its own judgement, and reads any gap between expectation and performance as a verdict. The first part behaves reasonably well. Most of the damage comes from the second.

So the more useful question isn't how high your standards are. It's what happens to you when you fail to meet them. "This isn't good enough yet" and "I shouldn't be the kind of person who produces something this bad" feel adjacent, but they're doing completely different work. The first one is about the thing you made. The second one is about you.

When the standard turns into a judge

In psychodynamic language you might think about this through the demanding or punitive superego — an internalised authority that watches, evaluates, prohibits, and passes sentence. A reasonably functional version of that voice says: look at this again, you could have handled that better, there's something to learn here. A harsher one says you should already know this, that someone genuinely competent wouldn't have made that mistake, that if other people see this they'll realise you're not as capable as they thought. And then, eventually: what does this say about you?

The difference isn't how strict the voice is. It's what it's measuring. Once your sense of your own worth depends on hitting the standard, missing it threatens more than the task did. A mistake stops being information and becomes evidence for the prosecution. It's hard to learn anything when every attempt is a trial.

Almost everything begins badly

There's a period in nearly every worthwhile skill during which you are, objectively, not very good at it. The first article is rarely the best article. The first presentation is stiff. Your early decisions in a new profession will contain choices that you'd recognise as clumsy five years later, if you could bear to look. Your first drawing probably does look bad. There's no intellectual route around this — competence requires some exposure to the experience of incompetence, and no amount of preparation substitutes for it.

This gets complicated when competence is welded to self-worth. If being inexperienced just means I am inexperienced, then practice is uncomfortable but survivable. If being inexperienced means I am inadequate, practice becomes a threat, and you're no longer learning something. You're defending an identity while pretending to learn something.

A short detour through the hardest case

The clearest version of this I know comes from psychotherapy training, and it's instructive precisely because the usual permission doesn't apply there. A trainee therapist isn't learning to throw pots. There's another person in the room, and "I have to be willing to be bad at this" can't become a licence to practise irresponsibly. Competence, supervision and the limits of one's training all matter in a way they don't when you're posting mediocre photographs.

And yet the failure mode at the other end is just as real. A beginner can quietly hold themselves to the standard of someone twenty years in: every intervention meaningful, every silence understood, every formulation coherent, knowing when to speak and when not to, all in real time with a person two metres away waiting for a response. Written down it's plainly absurd. From the inside it rarely feels absurd at all — it feels like the minimum.

What makes the case sharp is what happens next. Supervision exists so that trainees can bring their confusion, their mistakes, and the moments they didn't understand — which are exactly the things shame makes people hide. The need to appear competent interferes with the process that would have made them competent.

Nissen-Lie and colleagues (2017) studied 70 therapists and 255 patients and found that professional self-doubt was associated with better patient outcomes — but only when it coexisted with an accepting relationship toward oneself. Low self-doubt plus high self-regard was not the winning combination. They called the paper "Love yourself as a person, doubt yourself as a therapist?"

What that case teaches, generally

Three things seem to travel well beyond the consulting room.

The first is that doubt comes in two varieties that look similar from outside. One keeps you curious — maybe I misunderstood, perhaps I moved too fast, I should get another opinion on this. The other just says I'm terrible at this. One opens thought and the other closes it. Humility and humiliation aren't the same instrument, and confidence is not the cure for either.

The second is that shame reliably produces concealment, and concealment is expensive anywhere improvement depends on someone else seeing your actual work. It's the same reason people don't share the draft, don't ask the question in the meeting, don't show the code that embarrasses them. What gets hidden can't get corrected.

The third is the distinction underneath both. Guilt organises itself around something you did; shame organises itself around what you are. "That intervention wasn't helpful" leaves the behaviour available for inspection. "I'm a terrible therapist" puts the whole self on trial and leaves nothing to work with. Same for "this piece of writing isn't very good" versus "it's embarrassing that someone like me wrote this."

Experience isn't the same as practice

We tend to imagine the savagely self-critical person as the more conscientious one. Surely whoever is replaying the day at midnight cares more. But reflection and self-attack aren't the same process. One asks what you missed and what you'd try differently. The other has to get through a prior question first — what does this prove about me? — and that question eats everything. It produces over-preparation, rigidity, defensiveness about feedback, and concealment of exactly the material that would have helped.

Which is why accumulated hours aren't expertise, and neither is thinking about the work. Improvement needs contact with your own output, weaknesses included. It needs you to watch yourself be bad on purpose.

What not trying protects

Avoidance makes sense once you see what it's defending. If trying generates information about who you might be, then not trying protects you from receiving that information, and your potential stays intact. Never write seriously and you can go on believing you'd have been an excellent writer. Never build the project and you keep the sophisticated version you imagined. If the work never meets reality, reality never gets to contradict the fantasy.

Possibility is flattering. Practice isn't — practice gives feedback, and feedback tells you where your abilities actually are right now. Which is the whole asymmetry: wanting to do something well doesn't stop you doing it. Being threatened by the prospect of doing it imperfectly might.

The critic's promise

Self-criticism survives because it presents itself as responsible. If I stop being hard on myself my standards will slip. If I accept mediocre work I'll become mediocre. If I'm not ashamed of my mistakes I'll stop correcting them. Shame feels like proof that you care.

It's a tidy theory with one problem: it doesn't seem to be true. People who meet their own failures with some kindness don't get complacent — if anything they try harder afterwards, and put more work into the thing they just failed at. Which undercuts the central assumption, that self-attack is the engine of improvement. You can apparently see a weakness clearly without humiliating yourself for having it. Being less cruel to yourself doesn't mean expecting less of yourself. It mostly makes it safe enough to look.

The capacity to be embarrassed

What growth seems to require is a quality nobody puts on a CV: the ability to tolerate being unimpressive. To be corrected. To ask the question you're afraid everyone else already understands. To make something that doesn't yet match your own taste. To show the draft. To find out your understanding was incomplete, to realise three hours later what you wish you'd said, to look at your work from two years ago and wince.

None of that means abandoning standards, and in fields where other people carry the cost it can't mean abandoning responsibility either. It means letting standards guide development rather than function as the entry requirement for being allowed to develop at all. "This wasn't good enough, I need to understand why" and "I should be ashamed I wasn't already better" point in opposite directions. One makes learning possible. The other makes hiding attractive.

So I still occasionally come across someone's early work and think: I'd never have dared put that out. I'm less convinced than I used to be that this reflects well on me. The person who dared may have fifty attempts behind them by now. I might have one, carefully protected from view.

Maybe they're not shameless. Maybe shame just has less authority over what they're allowed to do next. They notice the work is weak, they see the mistake, they feel the embarrassment — and then they carry on, which turns out to be the part that matters. Growth doesn't require convincing yourself that everything you make is good. It requires being able to look directly at something that wasn't good enough without converting the observation into a verdict about your worth. That wasn't helpful. I moved too fast. I didn't understand what was happening. This isn't very good. I wasn't ready for that conversation. I need more practice.

And then, instead of convening the internal tribunal, you go back to the work. Practice has an inconvenient habit of making people better.

References

  1. Nissen-Lie, H. A., Rønnestad, M. H., Høglend, P. A., Havik, O. E., Solbakken, O. A., Stiles, T. C., & Monsen, J. T. (2017). Love yourself as a person, doubt yourself as a therapist? Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 24(1), 48–60. doi:10.1002/cpp.1977