I think I am in love with Ken Follett

I had never heard of Ken Follet until I read an interview with him on Booktopia. But I think I am now in love with him. Not because of his distinguished good looks (without being ageist, see photo below - he looks a little like Santa's less hairy brother) but because of an answer he gave in his interview



When asked what advice he would give aspiring writers he only said "Be a perfectionist". A man after my own heart! I have no idea if I can write a novel, no idea if I have the discipline to commit to writing a minimum of 2500 words a day, but a perfectionist? Now that I have well and truly mastered.

A few months ago I was on the receiving end of some 360 degree feedback at work. A confronting exercise at the best of times, always full of things that both warm your heart and make you go red in the face with strenuous denial. In the area of perfectionism, my scores skyrocketed. This was not news to me - my poor family, often on the receiving end of my perfectionist tendencies, had been gently and not-so-gently suggesting this to me for years. My leadership coach, the same one who told me I was a sucker for procrastinaction, kindly explained that being a perfectionist was not necessarily a good thing before handing me a copy of a book called "Perfectionism: A sure cure for happiness". I didn't even try arguing that correct punctuation makes me deliriously happy.

And so I discovered that perfectionism is not a good thing in the work place. Or so I thought. A couple of weeks later, in my annual performance review, I raised this with my two managers, who had both scored me about 11/10 on the perfectionist scale. I asked them what advice they had for curing this undesirable trait, to which they responded "We don't want you to fix it. That's why we hired you". It turns out one of my bosses had another Somerville House graduate work for her years earlier, who was also a perfectionist. So when Lorraine saw my CV and glimpsed the words 'Somerville House' she sent for an immediate interview and I was hired within a week. Perplexed, I asked why they had then scored my perfectionism as a negative behaviour in the feedback. They simply responded that I just needed to work on perceptions. My perfectionism made me work long hours. Rather than telling me to get a better work/life balance, they simply said that if I wanted to continue writing emails at midnight that was fine, but maybe just save them to my outbox and send them first thing in the morning.

Perhaps this blog should be called an ode to work/life balance - or how not to do it. Starring Kathryn Tyrrell.

It seems quite ironic really that the reason I am taking time off work to write my book is because I am a perfectionist, yet this is the quality Ken thinks I need to have as an aspiring writer. Either way, it seems that I don't need to kill of all of my perfectionist tendencies just yet. Which is a relief because I hadn't quite figured out the absolutely best way to go about doing it.