From: The Wall Street Journal
Inside the Minds of the Perfectionists
The Wall Street Journal:
Christine Tsien Silvers says perfectionism runs in her family. Her mother, a detail-oriented computer scientist, emigrated from China to Minnesota and was “always taking classes to get a better job.”
She earned a Ph.D. from MIT and an M.D. from Harvard. “But I also wanted to be the best mother possible,” says Dr. Silvers, so she worked part-time, not full-time, emergency-room shifts to maximize her time with her children, ages 3, 5 and 8.
Dr. Silvers, 42, now works from home in Marshfield, Mass., as the chief medical officer of a start-up company using her MIT dissertation to create mobile health monitors. She often gets up in the middle of the night “to do the work part of the work-life balance,” she says. Still, she frets about everything she hasn’t done, including organizing her house. “The list goes on and on, but I don’t want to do a sloppy job on any of them.”
Meanwhile, she is already seeing signs of perfectionism in her 5-year old son. “He loves to draw but he’ll cry and cry if he thinks he’s put a line in the wrong place,” Dr. Silvers says.
Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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