THE SNARE OF PERFECTIONISM

“Mr. Welles’ problem was that he wanted it both ways. He was a perfectionist who expected his collaborators to sit around endlessly waiting for him to make up his mind–and to pay for all the overtime that he ran up along the way. Simon Callow, his biographer, has summed up this failing in one devastating sentence: ‘Any form of limitation, obligation, responsibility or enforced duty was intolerable to him, rendering him claustrophobic and destructive.’ That’s the wrong kind of perfectionism, and it led, as it usually does, to disaster…”