Turn Your Musts Into Preferences to Loosen Perfectionism

Brad Jacobs, the serial founder behind equipment giant United Rentals, logistics giant XPO, and building products company QXO, said that when he was younger he suffered a lot from perfectionism. He wanted himself to be perfect, he wanted everyone else to be perfect, and he wanted the universe to go swimmingly well on command.

After about 10 years as chief executive of United Rentals, he stepped down, stayed on as chairman, and wanted to start his next company from scratch. He spent a couple of years trying to find the idea, the financial crisis arrived, and he felt lost. It was, he said, the only time in his life he was depressed, and when he took a questionnaire called the Beck Depression Inventory, he said it came up as depressed.

What helped, he said, was two years of cognitive therapy, twice a week for an hour and a half each time. In a safe, confidential, and trusting setting with a professional, he learned to notice his automatic, negative, irrational, and unconstructive thoughts. Then he practiced a two step response: first validate the thought, then dispute it, first joining it and then leading, as Jacobs put it, "to a more constructive way of looking at things."

After a few sessions, his therapist named the pattern as perfectionism and gave him the core exercise: reduce demands, musts, shoulds, and commands into preferences. The therapist offered the wording as an example of a demand turned into a preference, as Jacobs put it: "I would like me to be better. I would like you to be better." And: "I'd like things to go better, but they don't have to. I can still be happy."

The point was radical acceptance, meaning accepting that things will not go perfectly or all the time, and that he could be happy anyway. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos often says, "don't fight with reality because reality always wins." Jacobs said expecting perfection "will cause you stress and strain" and will not really work, because, as he found, nothing is perfect.