Perfectionism is a characteristic of a lot of people. They want everything happen in one moment. They don't want to spend time by learning something. Everything has to be perfect from the beginning. And most time they think that just there own work can be perfect and don't want to trust other people's work.
Perfectionism can be a good characteristic. You can use it to motivate yourself and others to work harder and it can make you looking at details, so that you see mistakes better and can improve it.
But it can also be a bad characteristic. While you try to make things better or give advice you can act like an egoist and seem unfriendly because you think other people are not working good.
For the interactive video-project i worked in a group with 4 other students. 2 germans, 2 dutch…1 girl, 3 guys. the dutch guy wasn't there in the first meeting so we decided to choose him as our actor in the video because nobody else wanted to do it.
Now I think it was a bad idea, because the actor is the most important person when you have to make a video. and you shouldn't choose the person which isn't there at the first meeting. you should choose somebody you can trust and who wants to have a perfect video in the end, just like you. otherwise you will loose your nerves. just like i did.
I think there were two perfectionists in our group, one student who is just lazy and two students who works a lot but just want to finish it and do not think a lot about it.
We had a really good idea for our project. We had to make an interactive video and we choose the themes education and sport. Our idea was a game called RiG which should improve the life of students.
We thought a lot about our story, the video and the game itself. I think we had more work than other groups because they just had to make a video and we developed also the idea of a game.
But we started on time, so that it shouldn't be a problem to be finish on time.
We had fun in working for our video because we wanted to see the result and everybody liked the theme we were working on. We were nearly the first group which starts filming. But we didn't think enough about it, we just started without a plan. We had made a script before but we forgot to mention a lot of things and especially our actor wasn't good prepared for his role. He didn't bring the right clothes and didn't have the right hair dress and just didn't think about it.
But he and the group improved. We had a discussion about the script again and tried to write in everything we needed for one scene and which clothes the actor has to bring. We filmed from more perspectives and added a few interactive parts and everybody brought in his ideas and worked in the project.
But when we wanted to finish filming the actor wasn't in school anymore and we couldn't reach him on the phone or on the internet. After one week – we thought he is dead or has quitted the study – he came back to Uni and said: “ Yeah, I am sorry I was ill.”!? How can you be so sick that you can't answer on a call or a message or send a short mail to inform your group?
That was the time when I didn't enjoy this group-work anymore. I didn't want to work anymore with this guy, didn't have fun in the project anymore, didn't thought that the video is going to become a success and didn't want to spend any more time on it.
That was my problem in this group work, because I am one of the perfectionists.
I don't like to work with people who just want to finish something and do not think about it. I don't like to work with people who does not have a look for details and do not want to make something perfect.
But I think it is the same with my group members, they don't really liked to work with me, because I said all the time: “ Do it out of this perspective, and from over here.” and “Let him doing this again, let's film it one more time.” and gave them the feeling that I did not like their work. But I liked and after we changed the script and the way how to work I enjoyed working with them.
But then we didn't have a lot of time anymore because we lost one important week and we just had to finish everything so we didn't work good we just worked fast. And I lost the fun again and the thought that this project is going to become a good one.
I have pictures in my head, how it should look like and than I want to do it totally like this and am not open for other ideas anymore.
And if I think that something won't become good, I don't want to work on it anymore. I don't like to present things which are not good and I don't like it if I can't make them become better. But in this study I am not perfect in every course. The most things I didn't do before and I have to learn a lot.
The last week before the video-presentation was terrible, because I didn't like what we did and I especially didn't like what I did and how I edited my parts of the video. But I couldn't improve it because I didn't know how. I wasn't able to work with the video editing program as good as I wanted to and I didn't have as many good ideas as I wanted to have.
I hate the feeling if I can't do something perfect. But now I know that you can't be perfect the most time. Everybody from my group did video editing and filming and writing a script and everything what we did for the first time and you can't be perfect when you do something the first time. It is not possible and it doesn't have to be possible because we are studying to improve and how could you improve if you would be perfect. So I learned not to expect too much because nobody can be perfect and I unlearned to try to be perfect.
At this moment I use this unlearned skill the first time because I hate to write essays, especially in English, because I know that I am not good in it. But I know while I wrote my two essays I improved my writing and if I will do it a lot of times I can become really good in it (not perfect!). Just like my group in making an own interactive video. We didn't do a good job all the time but we improved while working on the project and I think our presentation was a big success. I am really surprised that I say that, but I think the video was a big success and we did a really good job in the end.
