What School Didn’t Teach Us: Perfectionism Can Destroy You

Welcome back to our summer series, “What School Didn’t Teach Us,” where six writers—one for each day this week (except Sunday, that’s Douglas’s day)—share the lessons they’ve learned outside of formal education. Yesterday, Joe Nocera wrote that he learned “absolutely nothing” in college—yet managed to succeed anyway. Today, Hadley Freeman explains that attending highly academic private schools left her unable to think for herself; for years, she was taught that there is only ever one right answer.

“But what did you think?”

I was 34 and had just submitted an interview to my editor at the newspaper where I worked. It was with a well-known actor, so we’re not talking Watergate levels of journalism here. Nonetheless, my editor pointed out to me that I’d done little more than transcribe what the actor had said.

“What did you actually think of him? Was he smart? Arrogant? Interesting?” she asked.

“I’ll do it again,” I said, then hurried back to my desk and stared at my hands. This was a disaster for two reasons: First, it was definitive proof I was bad at my job—I’d failed a test!—and I’d rather lose a limb than be that. And second, I had no idea what I thought, about this actor, or anyone, or anything.

I’d been working in features journalism for 12 years at this point. I’d learned how to fake sassiness, and I could even fake having an opinion sometimes. But all I was actually doing was copying the opinions of others around me and putting a funny little spin on them, because I realized readers like funny little spins, and I lived to please. Or to put it another way, I just wanted to get good grades. So when I wrote an article, I didn’t think, Is this a fair representation of how I see things? I thought, Is this what people want me to write? Because that’s how I’d been taught to think since I was five years old.