The hidden craving behind perfectionism, and why working harder to win people over so often backfires
We don't usually think of perfectionism as greed. Greed is for other people, the grasping, the never-enough, the wanting more than your share. When we stay late three nights in a row to polish a presentation, rehearse a difficult conversation until every word is defensible, or quietly need the whole room to leave impressed, it doesn't feel like an appetite. It feels like conscientiousness. It feels like caring. It feels, if anything, virtuous.
I want to suggest something less flattering, and more useful: a great deal of perfectionism is a form of craving. Not for money or status in the obvious sense, but for approval, reassurance and the certainty of being liked.
Beneath all of these desires is one fundamental longing: the wish to feel safe. We seek to be beyond criticism, rejection, and anyone's negative opinion. This is the oldest motivation of all— we are drawn toward the desire of approval and away from the cold sting of inadequacy. However, like every craving, this desire often leads to the opposite of what it promises.
The craving we flatter as virtuous
In the tradition of CBT, the therapeutic model I work with most, we pay close attention to what a behaviour is actually for, its function, rather than how it dresses itself up. And a striking amount of what presents as high standards turns out, on inspection, to be an attempt to avoid painful thoughts and/or feelings. In this case, usually some version of I cannot bear for this to go wrong, or for these people to think less of me.
Desire for approval often disguises itself as a genuine pursuit of goodness and the goal of approval and acceptance. In modern life, these desires look respectable: caring, kind, and committed to doing good; this is hard to disavow. However, Buddhists call this craving, one of the three roots of suffering. The tell is in the reach. There's a difference between wanting to be a good person, worker, partner or friend and wanting everyone to experience us positively. That second part is a craving for control over other people's inner responses, and those responses are precisely what we can never control. None of this, I should say, makes the want itself unnatural. It's a completely human wish, and however firmly we lecture ourselves that it's unreasonable, it doesn't obediently pack up and leave. The want persists, and the trouble isn't that we have it; it's that we come to believe working hard enough will finally make it achievable.
If it worked, I’d say keep doing it.
We know we cannot keep everyone happy; we know people want different things from us, and we can't be all of them at once. One person in the room wants us to be warm and entertaining; another wants us to be clinical, precise, no-frills. An aim like everyone leaves satisfied can never actually be met, which makes it an unhelpful goal: one that guarantees a sense of failure before you've begun. If your standard for a good day is universal approval, you have built a machine that manufactures disappointment, and with it, more craving.
Most of us already realise this, but what feels like reaching for excellence is usually fleeing disapproval, criticism, and the dread of being found not good enough. Moving away from something you fear can never be satisfied, only briefly relieved. The best it offers is that nothing bad happened this time, and an anxious mind takes that relief and starts scanning for the next threat. So there's no endpoint; no amount of preparation ever buys enough certainty, because the thing you're running from is a feeling. Worse still, each time we avert disaster, we quietly teach ourselves that disaster was only averted because we did all the things. This leaves the fear not eased but confirmed. The stick keeps us running by keeping us afraid.
WHAT IT COSTS
Surprisingly, the strongest argument against making approval a goal isn't that it doesn't work, but that it's so costly. For example, someone desperate to appear competent often ends up seeming less so. This isn't due to a lack of ability; it's due to the sapping of our mental energy into monitoring the audience instead of focusing on being present. This craving for approval can sabotage the very impression we are trying to create.
This sort of disappointment tends to curdle. Because the disappointment begets fresh craving, and the craving begets more suffering, the whole thing tends to intensify rather than resolve. This is the part I see most often and find most human. When enormous effort meets an ordinary, lukewarm response- no praise, no acknowledgement- a seam of resentment opens up. I did all of this. I went the mile. They didn't even notice. It feels righteously unfair, terrible, and it frequently leads to a kind of retreat: "what's the point, they don't appreciate me". The very generosity that was meant to secure our place starts to sour into grievance and withdrawal. It does not surprise me that society is seeing a rise in quiet quitting, ghosting and familial estrangement. The pursuit of approval ends up costing us the goodwill it was chasing.
Gifting freedom to yourself and others
Here is a small thought experiment I find clarifying. Imagine someone new joins your team, and you're told, off the record, as a rule, that you have to like this person. It's practically against the law not to, and any lapse will be reported to HR. They're trying so hard; you must approve them and their ideas, or it's a hate crime.
Notice what happens. Most of us feel an immediate, prickling resistance. Don't tell me who or what to like. We want the freedom to form our own response, even a negative one. It's one of the few freedoms nobody willingly surrenders.
Now turn it around. When we demand to be liked, when we cannot tolerate someone's indifference, disagreement or disapproval, we are, in effect, trying to impose that same law on everyone else. We're asking the world to give up a freedom we would never give up ourselves. No wonder it breeds friction rather than closeness. And the ache of it, that I can't stand that they don't like me feeling, is one many of us know intimately, often from adolescence onward. It is a genuinely hard feeling. But it is not an emergency; it is not a fact about our worth, and it's certainly not a permanent state of affairs.
I sometimes ask people to bring to mind someone who has struck them as unusually easy to be around. Very often it's a person who tends to hold others' judgements lightly that is experienced as warm, confident, and well-liked. If you didn't warm to them, they were curious about it, maybe, rather than wounded. And the paradox is that this is exactly the quality that makes a person feel safe to be near. When someone may still want or hope for our approval but they don't demand it, we can relax; there's nothing we have to perform. The one who relinquishes the need to be liked tends, without even trying, to be the most likeable person in the room.
Stepping Back
None of this means lowering our standards or ceasing to care about our work. The shift is subtler and, I think, kinder. It's a move from this must land perfectly to something more like my job is to show up and do my honest work, and let the room react how it reacts. It is a shift from trying to control the uncontrollable to anchoring ourselves in our own values. When we finally stop being greedy for everyone's approval, we give them the freedom to feel how they feel—and in doing so, we gift ourselves the freedom to finally be enough.
That last part is where the Buddhist and CBT threads meet most closely. Both point at the futility of clinging to outcomes we don't control—what one tradition calls attachment, the other calls psychological rigidity. We prepare well; we offer what we have; and we can then step back, because whether a given person ends up impressed was never fully ours to decide.
It's worth noticing, too, what perfectionism secretly costs us in our closest relationships. Real security with another person isn't built on a flawless record. It's built on making room for the full range of feeling, the good and the less flattering, within reason. Think honestly about the people you love most. Have we only ever had warm thoughts about them? Almost no one says yes. Sometimes the children are infuriating; sometimes a partner is boring; sometimes a dear friend grates. What holds the bond together is the tolerance, grace, and compassion wrapped around those moments, and that is precisely what tells us it's safe to be imperfect here even when we don’t mean to be. The perfectionist, forever trying to be beyond reproach, cuts themselves off from the very thing they're longing for. By avoiding any situation in which that easy, forgiving acceptance might be offered freely, they never get to receive it.
Becoming more resilient
In practice, the shift can be small. Before a meeting that has us tightening up, it's worth asking what we're actually reaching for. If it's everyone must be satisfied, we might gently name that as the craving it is, and set it down. We can let the aim be to speak clearly and listen well. We can even, deliberately, allow ourselves to be imperfect, to not nail it, as a kind of practice. Permission to be ordinary is, for the approval-greedy mind, is a genuinely radical act. It's also a relief, not least because we get to discover that we, and our relationships, survive it. I often suggest going low and slow with this. The gentlest possible starting point might be to leave one small typo in our next email to the kindest person on our team, and simply notice that the sky stays up. From there, we work our way along.
Wanting to be valued is deeply human; there's nothing to be ashamed of in it. It speaks to our values, to wanting to be good, and to do well by the people around us. But when that wanting hardens into a need for everyone's approval, it stops serving us. It makes us more anxious. It makes us perform worse. And it slowly turns our best efforts into a ledger of grievances, transforming the people around us into an "us" and a "them". Seen clearly as a craving, it becomes something we can hold more lightly. And holding it more lightly is the only version of this that ever actually brings the ease we were looking for all along.