Redoing what nobody asked you to redo
You reread the email after you’ve sent it.
Not before — after. It’s gone, you can’t change it, and you’re still in the sent folder checking it for mistakes.
That’s one of the small ones. There are others, and you’ll recognise yours: the two-line message drafted four times. The finished work given “one last look” — twice. The slide nobody will look at for more than three seconds, tidied anyway. The apology you attach when you hand things over — “it’s still a bit rough, sorry” — about work that isn’t rough, and you know it isn’t.
And behind all of it, the strangest part: the pass mark moves. You aim for the standard, you hit it, and by the time you land, the standard has gone up. Ninety per cent was the goal until you reached ninety; then the missing ten was all you could see. The finish line has never once stayed put. You may never have said this out loud, but you know it’s true: you have never actually arrived.
You call it having high standards. And people believe you, because your work is genuinely good — that’s not in question. But here’s a distinction that took me a long time to see. High standards are selective. A person with high standards knows where excellence matters and spends it there, deliberately. What you have checks everything — the important email and the trivial one, the work that will be studied and the work nobody will open. It can’t tell the difference. Because it was never really about the work.
It’s about the moment the work gets seen.
Every redo, every extra pass, every “one last look” delays the same moment: the moment your work leaves your hands and gets judged. And somewhere inside, that has never felt like the work being judged. It feels like you. The redoing isn’t perfectionism for its own sake. It’s protection. A few more minutes of polish buys a few more minutes before the verdict.
And if verdicts were once dangerous — if you learned early that mistakes got noticed, and named, and remembered — then protecting yourself from them wasn’t a character flaw. It was smart. You didn’t choose that standard. It was handed to you, a long time ago, by a situation that needed you to be beyond criticism. You’ve been keeping it up ever since, at your own cost, long after anyone stopped checking.
That’s the part to be kind to yourself about. The examiner in your head was never your invention.
But here’s the good news buried in all this: if the redoing is protection, then you don’t need better standards — you need better evidence. Evidence that “seen” and “safe” can happen at the same time.
So try one small experiment this week. Pick something genuinely minor — a low-stakes email, a routine piece of work — and send it after one pass. One. Then close the folder and watch what actually happens.
Almost always: nothing. No verdict. No consequence. The world takes your ninety per cent and carries on, completely satisfied.
You’ll feel uncomfortable for a few seconds while you collect that evidence. But that’s a few seconds of discomfort, traded against years of doing everything twice.
Your work was already good. It’s been good for a long time. The only person who hasn’t got that verdict yet is you.
— Adam