Greedy for Approval

The hidden craving behind perfectionism, and why working harder to win people over so often backfires

We don't usually think of perfectionism as greed. Greed is for other people, the grasping, the never-enough, the wanting more than your share. When we stay late three nights running to polish a presentation, when we rehearse a difficult conversation until every word is defensible, when we quietly need the whole room to leave impressed, it doesn't feel like appetite. It feels like conscientiousness. It feels like caring. It feels, if anything, virtuous.

I want to suggest something less flattering, and more useful: a great deal of perfectionism is a form of craving. Not for money or status in the obvious sense, but for approval, for reassurance, for the certainty of being liked.

And underneath all of those, if you keep asking what they're really for, tends to sit one plain thing, a wish to be safe. To be beyond criticism, beyond rejection, beyond the reach of anyone's poor opinion. It's the oldest carrot and the oldest stick: we run toward the warmth of being approved of, and away from the cold of being found wanting. Like every craving, though, it has a habit of delivering the opposite of what it promises.

The craving we flatter as virtuous

In the tradition of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the therapeutic model I work in most, we pay close attention to what a behaviour is actually for, its function, rather than how it dresses itself up. And a striking amount of what presents as high standards turns out, on inspection, to be an attempt to manage a feeling. The feeling underneath is usually some version of I cannot bear for this to go wrong, or for these people to think less of me.

This is where the carrot and the stick matter more than they first appear. The same late night at the desk can be driven by two very different engines. One person is moving toward something they value, genuinely reaching for good, careful work. Another is moving away from a threat, the dread of disapproval, and merely calling it good work. In functional terms these are appetitive and aversive control, and they look identical from the outside. What tells them apart is the direction and the intensity of the pull. Approval-seeking, in my experience, is nearly always the second kind wearing the costume of the first: not so much chasing the carrot of being liked as fleeing the stick of being disliked, and fleeing it hard.

Buddhist psychology has a blunt old word for the engine of this: craving, or in the classical framing, one of the three roots of suffering alongside aversion and delusion. What's interesting is how respectable it looks in a modern professional life. Greed for approval doesn't announce itself. It wears the clothes of diligence. It says I just want to do a really good job. And who could argue with that?

The tell is in the reach. There's a difference between wanting to do good work and needing everyone in the meeting to be delighted, to fully understand, to be won over, to leave with no unmet expectation and no wasted minute of their time. That second list isn't a standard. It's a bid for total control over other people's inner responses, and other people's inner responses are precisely the thing we can never control. None of this, I should say, makes the want itself unnatural. It's a completely human wish, and however firmly we lecture ourselves that it's unreasonable, it doesn't obediently pack up and leave. The want persists. The trouble isn't that we have it; it's what happens when we organise our whole working life around satisfying it.

Why it doesn't work, on its own terms

The most persuasive case against approval-seeking isn't a moral one. It's that it simply fails at its own job. Start with performance. The mind braced to win everyone over is a mind flooded with threat: What if my boss thinks this is rubbish? What if they can tell I'm nervous? What if I've missed something? That vigilance is expensive. It narrows attention, crowds out the actual task, and makes us stilted precisely when we most want to be fluent. The person desperate to seem competent tends to come across as less so, not because they lack ability, but because so much of their bandwidth is spent monitoring the audience instead of doing the thing. The craving sabotages the very impression it's straining to create.

Then there's the arithmetic problem, which is even simpler. You cannot keep everyone happy, not because people are at war with one another, but because different people simply want different things from you, and you can't be all of them at once. One person in the room wants you to be warm and entertaining; another wants you clinical, precise, no frills. An aim like everyone leaves satisfied can never actually be met, which makes it a peculiar sort of goal: one that guarantees a sense of failure before you've begun. If your standard for a good day is universal approval, you have built a machine that manufactures disappointment, and, with it, more craving.

And disappointment, left to itself, curdles. Because the disappointment begets fresh craving, and the craving begets more suffering, the whole thing tends to intensify rather than settle. This is the part I see most often and find most human. When enormous effort meets an ordinary, lukewarm response, no praise, no acknowledgement, people simply moving on, a seam of resentment opens up. I did all of this. I ticked every box. They didn't even notice. It feels righteous. It also feels terrible. And it frequently leads to a kind of retreat: Fine. I won't bother next time. The very generosity that was meant to secure our place starts to sour into grievance and withdrawal. Quiet quitting, in a word. The pursuit of approval ends up costing us the goodwill it was chasing.

Gifting freedom to yourself and others

Here is a small thought experiment I find clarifying. Imagine someone new joins your team, and you're told, quietly, as a rule, that you have to like this person. It's practically against the law not to, and any lapse will be reported to HR. They're trying so hard; you must approve or its a hate crime.

Notice what happens. Most of us feel an immediate, prickling resistance. Don't tell me who to like. We want the freedom to form our own response, even a negative one. It's one of the few freedoms nobody willingly surrenders.

Now turn it around. When we demand to be liked, when we cannot tolerate someone's indifference or disapproval, we are, in effect, trying to impose that same law on everyone else. We're asking the whole world to give up a freedom we would never give up ourselves. No wonder it breeds friction rather than closeness. And the ache of it, that I can't stand that they don't like me feeling, is one many of us know intimately, often from adolescence onward. It is a genuinely hard feeling. But it is not an emergency, it is not a fact about our worth and its certainly not a permanent state of affairs.

I sometimes ask people to bring to mind someone who has struck them as unusually easy to be around. Very often it's a person who was simply, visibly unbothered about being liked. Not cold, frequently the opposite, but not clinging to your good opinion. If you didn't warm to them, they were curious about it, maybe, rather than wounded. And the paradox is that this is exactly the quality that makes a person feel safe to be near. When someone may still want or hope for your approval but they don’t demand it, you can relax; there's nothing you have to perform. The one who relinquishes the need to be liked tends, quietly, to be the most likeable person in the room.

Loosening the grip

None of this means lowering your standards or ceasing to care about your work. The shift is subtler and, I think, kinder. It's a move from this must land perfectly with everyone to something more like my job is to show up and do my honest best, and then to let the outcome be what it is.

That last part is where the Buddhist and ACT threads meet most closely. Both point at the futility of clinging to outcomes we don't control, what one tradition calls attachment, the other calls psychological rigidity. You prepare well; you offer what you have; and then you loosen your fingers, because whether a given person ends up impressed was never fully yours to decide.

It's worth noticing, too, what perfectionism quietly costs us in our closest relationships. Real security with another person isn't built on a flawless record. It's built on making room for the full range of feeling, the good and the less flattering, within reason. Think honestly about the people you love most. Have you only ever had warm thoughts about them? Almost no one says yes. Sometimes the children are infuriating; sometimes a partner is boring; sometimes a dear friend grates. What holds the bond together isn't the absence of those moments but the tolerance, grace and compassion wrapped around them, and that is precisely what tells us it's safe to be imperfect here. The perfectionist, forever trying to be beyond reproach, cuts themselves off from the very thing they're longing for. By avoiding any situation in which that easy, forgiving acceptance might be offered freely, they never get to receive it.

In practice, the shift can be small. Before a meeting that has you tightening up, it's worth asking what you're actually reaching for. If it's everyone must be satisfied, you might gently name that as the craving it is, and set it down. You can let the aim be to speak clearly and listen well, rather than to win. You can even, deliberately, allow yourself to be imperfect, to not nail it, as a kind of practice. Permission to be ordinary is, for the approval-hungry mind, a genuinely radical act. It's also a relief, not least because you get to discover that you, and your relationships, survive it. I often suggest going low and slow with this. The gentlest possible starting point might be to leave one small typo in your next email to the kindest person on your team, and simply notice that the sky stays up. From there, you work your way along.

The reframe I'll end on is this. Wanting to be valued is deeply human; there's nothing to be ashamed of in it. It speaks to your values, to wanting to be good, and to do well by the people around you. But when that wanting hardens into a need for everyone's approval, it stops serving us. It makes us more anxious, not less. It makes us perform worse, not better. And it slowly turns our best efforts into a ledger of grievances, and the people around us into an us and a them. Seen clearly, as a craving rather than a virtue, it becomes something we can hold more lightly. And holding it more lightly is, as far as I can tell, the only version of this that ever actually brings the ease we were looking for all along.