Being Boundless vs. Being “Broken”

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Every week, I release a quick podcast with some meaningful thoughts that hopefully make your life better. And this is it. If you would like these thoughts delivered straight into your email inbox, go to bengreenfieldlife.com/newsletter.
And when you do that, you can also get access to leave comments, leave thoughts, leave your feedback because I love to hear what you think. All right, let's dive in. You know, growing up, I was the perfect kid-ish. I rarely got in trouble. I got really good grades. I was successful at all my jobs. I did well at sports. Everybody said I was really gonna amount to something. I even heard my little sister once describe me as having Golden Child Syndrome. I don't know what that is, but by the sounds of it, it seems like it could be about right. And as you can imagine, I got pretty obsessed with perfection pretty quickly. After all, it was my identity. It was my destiny. I was supposed to really be somebody. I didn't like owning anything with a noticeable blemish or shortcoming or deformity that could threaten to ruin my perfect image. I could spot a tiny grammar or spelling error on any essay or book or magazine article a mile away. By 14 years old, I got into bodybuilding to develop a flawless physique. And I would run straight up the side of the mountain behind my North Idaho childhood home, like clockwork, 40 minutes straight up, then back down before dinner.
Inconsistencies and imperfections around any rules, systems or protocols would drive me nuts. Anything that remotely sniffed of falling short or laziness or lack of attention to excellence or unproductivity also drove me nuts. Why is this not perfect yet? Why is this not trying harder to be perfect? Heck, even though I've lightened up a bit, that imperfection still irks me if I don't catch myself. Every open loop needs to be a closed loop in any area of life, including zero email inbox, no red notification badges on the phone screen, no tasks that have not been completed or delegated, or else I'll often lay awake at night, anxious about anything flawed or broken or incomplete that I or someone else needs to fix, and also anxious that I might be judged as anything less than one darn put-together guy by the world. As you can imagine, this obsession with perfection fueled my early personal and professional pursuit of extreme fitness and biohacking and supplements and diets and workouts and tools and technologies and procedures to maintain health and aesthetics and that image of perfection to the world. No imperfection. I must be unstoppable. I must be superhuman. I must be limitless, boundless. After all, the opposite of being boundless to me was being broken, and I certainly couldn't deal with that. And as I aged, the pursuit of perfection led to fewer and fewer efforts to become a well-rounded renaissance man. After all, learning new things meant initially being bad at them and risking public failure, an obvious sign of imperfection. And as time progressed, I found myself gradually, as I aged, avoiding anything I perceived myself to risk failing at. For example, once I realized I wasn't good enough in college to be a top collegiate or pro tennis player, I just kind of quit the sport and moved on. Once I stopped getting on the podium in triathlons and feeling myself slow down just a little bit, I moved on. Once professional obstacle course running got saturated by guys who were way faster than me, I moved on. I couldn't stand the idea of anything but a top finish, a podium, and I wouldn't enjoy a sport unless that was a real possibility. Even honestly, the relationship with my dad bore the brunt of my demands for perfection. When I was young, I thought he would be this rich and successful entrepreneur with a coffee-roasting empire, but he never went big with that despite my persistent nudging. And eventually, he and my mom got divorced, and that ruined the prospects for me of showcasing a perfect family to the world. My dad wandered the world, and he grew a big beard, and he got really skinny and started wearing hippie clothes and became this version of a man that seemed far from perfect by my standards. So we strayed apart, we didn't talk much. I'm not saying this to dishonor him, this is just the reality. And after he got cancer and he died, I felt like I officially failed in my final attempts to perfect him by saving his life. He became just another blemish or shortcoming or deformity on my record. And that's still something I'm dealing with, you know, not even being able to save my father and having that really bugged me.