There Are Two Kinds of Perfectionism. One Makes Champions. The Other Breaks Athletes.

Ask a room full of endurance athletes whether perfectionism helps or hurts, and you’d better clear your afternoon. Some will swear it’s the engine behind every good thing they’ve ever done. Others will tell you, with a little too much feeling, that it nearly ended their relationship with the sport. Matt Fitzgerald ran into exactly this divide a while back when he posted a simple poll: is perfectionism in athletes good or bad? Seventeen percent said good. Twenty-seven percent said bad. And the majority — fifty-six percent — landed on the only answer that’s actually correct: it depends.

It depends, as Matt explained in this Tuesday Teaching, because perfectionism isn’t one thing. It’s two. And the difference between them is the difference between an athlete who keeps getting better for years and one who burns out, beats themselves up, and quietly falls out of love with the thing they used to live for.

Here’s the full lesson — give it a watch, then read on for the breakdown.

The fear-based kind

Sports psychologists have a name for the destructive version. They call it perfectionistic concerns, and the emotion driving it is fear — specifically, a fear of failure, where failure means anything short of perfect. To an athlete wired this way, an A-minus is a catastrophe. A solid race with one bad split is a disaster. The bar is impossibly high, and missing it feels like proof of something broken.

What makes this kind especially cruel is where it usually comes from. More often than not, the standard wasn’t chosen by the athlete at all. It was handed to them — by a coach, a parent, a performance culture they grew up inside. The expectations belong to someone else, but the fear of falling short lives in them. And here’s the bitter irony Matt keeps coming back to: this orientation, the one that’s supposedly all about performing better, tends to make people perform worse. These are the athletes who train harder than anyone in the group and then tighten up when it counts. Too tense, too afraid, too fixated on the outcome to actually execute. They become the chokers and the underperformers, and over time, the research shows, they burn out at noticeably higher rates than everyone else.

Burnout, in this context, isn’t just fatigue. It’s falling out of love with your sport. And if you’ve ever watched a gifted athlete walk away bewildered by how much they’ve come to dread something they once couldn’t get enough of, you’ve probably watched perfectionistic concerns do their slow, quiet work.

Matt shared a passage from a runner named Rachel, who wrote candidly about living inside this kind of perfectionism. She described being so afraid of messing up that she felt everyone would see the moment she slipped. Perfectionism, she said, doesn’t just restrict what you do — it constricts who you are. That’s the part worth sitting with. It doesn’t stay in your training log. It shrinks your whole personality down to the size of your fear.

If that’s the only perfectionism you’ve ever known, Matt’s advice is gentle and direct: you’re allowed to leave the whole thing alone. Nobody has to be a perfectionist. But before you write it off entirely, he wants you to know there’s another version — and it looks almost nothing like the first.

The passion-based kind

The healthy variety is called perfectionistic strivings, and the engine isn’t fear. It’s passion. It’s the hunger to find out how much you’re capable of. Matt describes his own experience of it as a kind of gratitude bordering on awe — the sense that he’s been handed this remarkable gift of a body and a mind that can do things, and he simply wants to see how far he can stretch it. He still feels fear, like every athlete does. But fear isn’t what pulls him toward his highest standard. Passion is.

The other thing that changes is ownership. When your standards are self-determined — when you set the bar instead of inheriting it — falling short still stings, but you’re in control of it. That single shift, from standards imposed on you to standards chosen by you, makes all the difference. You become the steward of your own potential rather than a defendant in someone else’s courtroom.

And then comes the part that flips everything. Athletes with perfectionistic concerns are fixated on the result: win or lose, met the standard or didn’t, full stop. Athletes with perfectionistic strivings are far more focused on the one thing they can actually control — the process. They’re not trying to get better, exactly. They’re trying to get better at getting better. They treat every session as deliberate practice and pour their attention into how mindfully and intentionally they execute it, rather than obsessing over the number on the watch.

This is where the second irony lands, and it’s the hopeful one. The more outcome-obsessed you are, the worse your outcomes get. The more you focus on perfecting the process, the better your results become — and the more protected you are from burnout. Matt points out that this is exactly what he sees when he talks to genuine champions. They want to win as much as anyone alive, but they’d rather talk to you about practice than about the game. They understand, instinctively, that the step in front of them is the only step that matters, because it’s the only one they control.

What it looks like in practice

Matt’s clearest example of the good kind isn’t even from running — it’s from writing. He calls himself a selective perfectionist. He doesn’t try to be perfect at everything, and he’s published plenty of work he knew wasn’t his best effort. But with his forthcoming memoir, due out in September, perfection was flatly the standard. He revised relentlessly, fixing any sentence, phrase, or single word that struck him as less than right, fully aware the whole time that he could never actually achieve perfection. And that’s the tell: knowing he’d fall short didn’t ruin it for him. It freed him. He set the bar as high as he could reach, chased it with very little fear and a great deal of joy, and came away proud of the work and in love with the process of doing it.

That’s the whole teaching, really, boiled down to a choice. You can strive to execute your sport as perfectly as you’re able, focused on the things within your control — or you can fear imperfect outcomes and let that fear run the show. One path makes you better and makes the journey richer. The other makes you tense, then tired, then done.

If you train with us, you’ll recognize the healthy version everywhere in how we coach. The 80/20 approach is, at its core, a process you can perfect over years — easy days truly easy, hard days truly hard, attention paid to execution rather than to ego. If you want a structured way to start chasing mastery instead of chasing approval, our free AI-powered training plan is a good first step, and our full library of training plans goes deeper. Coaches who want to learn how to cultivate this mindset in their own athletes can dig into our Coaching Certification Course.