Thomas Curran

And so I'm going to, I've got my pen and I'm taking some notes as we speak, but I'm instantly reminded of two of my other guests that have been on the podcast.

And I absolutely am such a big fan of their work, Dr. Thomas Curran and Jennifer Wallace.

So as you know, Dr. Thomas Curran talks about socially prescribed perfectionism and Jennifer talks about mattering.

So When you're thinking, and I feel my audience as well, who has been on this journey of understanding perfectionism with me, is ready to sort of dive into that right now.

And kind of with the reduced class time, we freed up time for students just to engage in things they loved and cared about, whether it was research or service or, you know, something to find some meaning in their lives.

And so, and then the last piece, which was modest in scope, was this kind of metacognition curriculum where we taught them to recognize the mindsets and to learn how to manage them.

And I think maybe the most gratifying thing about it was, yeah, fantastic, the mental health improved.

But not only did academic performance not drop, it rose too, which was like the average score on our step one of the national board exam rose, and the failure rate was cut in half.

These platforms benefit from you staying on them as long as possible, buying as much as possible.

I recently read The Perfection Trap by Thomas Curran, and he shared that Facebook used to be a site where college students just posted embarrassing photos of each other for shits and giggles.

It was this benign, playful website that was truly about networking and But it wasn't making that much money.

Then it launched Facebook ads in 2007.

And when Sheryl Sandberg came over from Google in 2008, she helped turn that advertising business into Facebook's economic engine.

And as Thomas Curran explores in The Perfection Trap, that changes everything.

the platform isn't just there to help you connect with your friends anymore.

In fact, you usually don't see many of your friends' posts at this point, even on your regular news feed.

But it got me thinking again on mastery and thinking about, gosh, it was probably a year ago when I read a book on the life of C.S. Lewis.

i'm a fan of and you know he was a master in his writing he mastered obviously writing and storytelling and these things and yet you go about the rest of his life and i thought it's pretty average it's pretty average he wasn't out to master everything he wasn't out to please everybody you know him and jr r tolkien both you know but they they honed they focused on their craft they mastered that And the rest of life, they seem to enjoy for the most part fairly well.

And I looked at that and thought they weren't superheroes.

They didn't seem to be chewed up with, as you said, just pleasing every single person.

Let's do it.

So we're looking at this 35 year longitudinal study, and it was led by Thomas Curran.

He's a psychology professor at the London School of Economics, and this was published by the American Psychological Association.

And this wasn't just like a handful of kids, right?

It really covers a lot of ground.

It does.

We started by validating the weight of the backpack, looking at Thomas Curran's massive 35 year data set, proving that economic scarcity and algorithmic social media have fundamentally rewired our baseline for perfection.

We moved from the macro economy into the living room, exploring Dorn Bush and Butterfield's research to see how the warmth of an authoritative parent physically alters the HPA axis, wiring a teenager's brain for lifelong resilience.

And once that happens, achievement stops being something that you do, and it starts becoming part of how you establish your value in the world.

Psychologist Thomas Curran has studied perfectionism intensely.

Research summarized by the American Psychological Association looked at more than 20,000 college students across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and found that young people's perceptions of parental expectations and criticism have increased substantially over several decades.

In one analysis of more than 7,000 people, parental expectations and criticism were strongly associated with what researchers call socially prescribed perfectionism.

I really don't, no.

Well, he was called Thomas Curran and his mate's Andrew Hill, right? And they'd surveyed over 42,000 people between 1989, 2016.

So it's actually a really, really big survey on this perfectionism, right? And what he's saying is self-oriented perfectionism-

Mm-hmm