Are you obsessed with perfection? Do you constantly let yourself down, no matter how well you do? Do you expect too much from those around you? Even though they live in an imperfect world there are still many who are obsessed with making their lives absolutely perfect. However, if they leave no room for error, then no matter what challenge they take on, the end result will almost always be disappointment. The goal of this perfectionism test is to determine whether you have perfectionistic tendencies, to what degree, and in which areas of your life.

Examine the following statements and indicate which option best describes or applies to you. In order to obtain the most benefit from this test, please answer as honestly as possible.

This test is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional diagnosis or for the treatment of any health condition. If you would like to seek the advice of a licensed mental health professional you can search Psychology Today's directory here.

Paul and I were having brunch with friends, talking about upcoming travel plans, when he mentioned that they were flying to Berlin in September so I could race the marathon. Naturally, the conversation shifted to running. As they chatted about dessert- ​flavored gels, running through NYC’s boroughs, and the 20-mile-long run, someone asked, “Has Paul ever raced with you?”

I shot my partner an incriminating look as he offered back a pained smile.

Back in November 2022, I was shopping for a half marathon when Paul, who’d never run a road race, said he’d enter the Love Run Philadelphia Half Marathon with me. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. Finally, I thought, he’ll understand why I’m crazy about running.

Before he registered, I made sure to be up front about the training, the weekly mileage, the ups and downs that earned the course its nickname “Hilly Philly.” I didn’t want to scare Paul away, but I also didn’t want him to experience a sufferfest, crawling to the finish, reaching for the seams of my shorts as he whispered, “Never again.” But he was all for it. I crafted a beautiful—beautiful— 14-week

“Fourteen weeks?” he exclaimed after I emailed him the spreadsheet.

It was a rough start, but they carried on.

I studied his runs on Garmin Connect, revising workouts on the spreadsheet accordingly. I waxed poetic on the merits of sunscreen and caffeine gummies. When his miles wavered over 10 minutes, I gently suggested that he should push the pace. If he skipped runs, I’d casually ask, “How’s training going?”

Dear god, I’d become Captain Blood.

Merely a month into training, Paul broke his pinkie goalkeeping at a soccer match. After waiting hours past midnight in the ER, a doctor looked at his x-ray and advised us to cancel an upcoming ski trip. “Can I still run?” Paul asked.

“Running,” the doc said, “is the only thing you can do.” I smirked under my face mask. Nevertheless, Paul’s training derailed after that night.

Yes, my boyfriend broke his pinkie to get out of racing the Philly Love Run with me.

They say quitting is for losers, but honestly, I’m all for it. Lance Armstrong once said, “Pain is temporary. Quitting is forever.” And look where that got him. Paul’s strategic DNS reminded me of a crucial moment when I quit at something—and changed my life.

Long before I worked at Runner’s World, I was a baker at Boston’s Flour Bakery. It was my dream job second to working at the magazine. On my own, I plowed through the Flour cookbook, impressing friends with homemade Oreo cookies, waiting for bananas to overripen so they could be macerated into banana bread, overbaking a tray of “Mom’s Granola.” I had a B.A. in writing, and had worked as a food editor at a Florida magazine, but I was set on becoming a baker, the way Flour’s founder Joanne Chang had switched from being a management consultant to becoming a James Beard award–winning pastry chef. Baking is a science. Like running, it relies on numbers. At first, I was fascinated by how a professional kitchen operated, how they vied for oven space and yelled “corner!” and “knife behind!” to avoid collisions or an accidental stabbing in a fast-​moving environment. I fed Mom, the mother sponge, in the mornings. I became acquainted with their cookies by snacking on raw dough. I learned that pastries continued baking after being removed from the oven. I thought, with all I was learning, that things would get easier day by day. Instead, they only got harder.

As I watched fellow bakers adeptly decorate cakes and bake off 500 cookies, I struggled to meet my daily objectives. Trays of chocolate chips—our most popular cookie—were incinerated under my watch. There was the great chocolate ganache disaster that set me back hours behind schedule. Haphazard fruit tarts I put in the case were removed and redone.

At one point, after I was scolded for another baking mishap, a coworker commented, “You are either going to be the best baker ever—or kill us all.” One morning, I was weighing cookie dough at my station while Rachael, the pastry chef, stood at the stove stirring pastry cream. “We had another food magazine editor who also quit her job to work for us,” she casually said. “She left after a month.”

I had already outlasted that editor, but I decided I wouldn’t quit working at Flour at any cost. When Rachael had hired me, she told me to read a page from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook on hardbodies: “A hardbody never complains—a hardbody isn’t afraid to work through the toughest of times. A hardbody keeps cool and keeps creative.” Still, no matter how many times I tried to complete all my tasks, how many times I scalded my skin on an oven door or baking sheet, how much I kneaded to become a hardbodied baker, the bread never took form.

After my shifts, I ran along the Charles River to train for my third Boston Marathon. I brought up training with the savory chef, Ricardo, who worked at the station next to mine. I told him about how running was how I spent most of my time outside of the bakery. He didn’t understand why I liked running so much, so it was a shocker when he said that he’d like to try racing a half—but only if I coached him. Something in me felt lighter, and before I realized it, 10 names—including Rachael’s and Joanne’s—appeared on a stained page torn from my notebook, pledging to enter Boston’s Run to Remember in May. Except for Joanne, who’d raced several Bostons, most of the staff had never even run a road race.

I uploaded a training plan for beginners, scheduled and created weekly group runs on MapMyRun, and wrote long emails on hydration, static and dynamic stretching, and injury prevention. Training commenced in December 2014, and continued despite a polar vortex. Staff would stop by my workstation with shoe questions. Ricardo began calling me Coach. During another stressful shift when I once again was crunched for time baking cookie orders, Ricardo said to me, “You know, I still really hate running.” My heart sank. “But I wanted to let you know you write really great emails.”

It would take another year until I applied to NYU’s master’s journalism program. Before going to J-school and hanging up my apron temporarily (during school, I worked at Levain Bakery and Petee’s Pies to make ends meet), I ran the half with my coworkers. Every teammate finished. I couldn’t have been prouder.

Running continued to be my escape as I planned my exit from the bakery. I’d complete my shift, ride the subway home, go for my run, then study for the GRE. Races like the Chilly Half Marathon and Super Sunday would pop up. For some of my Flour teammates, the spark lasted. They ran together. Finally, as I tapered for my fourth Boston Marathon, I received my letter of acceptance to NYU. As a going away gift, Rachael gave me my first Boston Marathon Celebration Jacket. To this day, I visit her and her wife, who had also run Boston’s Run to Remember, every Patriots’ Day. I’d thought sticking it out at Flour, no matter what, would make me a hardbody. But it was quitting, and starting again from scratch, that took real bravery.

Nowadays, I’m my own harshest critic when I bake, much to the confusion of my coworkers who flock to the office kitchen when I bring in cookies. Ricardo, who moved to the U.K. before I left the bakery, dropped me a DM back in 2020.

“How are you, Coach? I got this feeling of running a marathon lately.”

“But, Chef, you hate running! What’s this quarantine doing to you?”

“I guess I started to like it since this pandemic. I already ran two halfs on my own. Even got running shoes. I’m a new man.”

Maybe someday, like Ricardo, Paul will come around. For now, I look for him in the crowd, and wave when I hear him call my name.

Amanda Furrer, one of Runner’s World’s Test Editors, has qualified for and run in the Boston Marathon consecutively since 2013, won the women’s division at the 2022 Atlanta Marathon, and joined the sub-3 club at the 2022 Chicago Marathon (2:56:31). She is training—without progress—her one-eyed cat, Fiona, to be the first feline to compete in Canicross.

Amanda is a test editor at Runner’s World who has run the Boston Marathon every year since 2013; she's a former professional baker with a master’s in gastronomy and she carb-loads on snickerdoodles. 

The three services above are their top choices for the best DNA test. But they weren't the only ones they tested. What follows are some additional options, none of which eclipsed the 23andMe, Ancestry or FamilyTreeDNA in any significant fashion. 

MyHeritage

MyHeritage offers a free tier of service that includes some basic family tree-building and access to excerpts of historical documents. It also includes a report of your genetic makeup across the company's 42 supported ethnicities, the identification of relatives and connections to them where possible. 

We found MyHeritage's user interface far less intuitive and more difficult to navigate than others. It's one of the few companies to offer a comprehensive research database of historical documents, DNA analysis and health screening -- they found the integration among them to be a bit clumsy. In 2018, MyHeritage committed a security breach, exposing the email addresses and hashed passwords of more than 92 million users.

Living DNA

LivingDNA divides its offerings in a different way than others. The $99 Full Ancestry DNA kit provides an overview of your ancestry in 150 geographical regions and information about maternal and paternal haplogroups and access to the company's genetic matching tool. The $120 "wellbeing package" includes reports about your physiological compatibility with vitamins, foods and exercise. And the $179 Wellbeing and Ancestry gives you all of it.

Despite. not selling or sharing data, the company has a very limited family match database; a company representative declined to supply me a specific number but said that it contained less than 1 million profiles. So, if you're looking to identify and make connections with relatives, there are better choices in the market. 

Whole genome sequencing

There are a number of companies -- including Full Genomes, Veritas Genetics, Nebula Genomics and Dante Labs -- that can sequence all of your DNA, otherwise known as your genome. This level of analysis is appropriate for advanced users only. Not only is it expensive -- these tests can run into the thousands of dollars, in some cases -- it requires a sophisticated understanding of both genetics and a range of technical tools required to explore and interpret your results. The least expensive whole genome tests cost about $300. 

For most people, the main rationale for sequencing the whole genome is to dive deep into your genetic health outlook. You can glean your personal risk factors for diseases, drug sensitivities and your status as a carrier; that is, what you might pass on to your kids. All of these efforts can also be undertaken -- to a less intense degree -- with some of the more affordable options outlined above. They suggest starting with Nebula Genomics. You can also upload an existing DNA sequence from Ancestry or 23andMe's DNA database and get Nebula's reports at a reduced price. 

Test crosses operate under the same principle no matter whether you are considering one gene or multiple genes; in all cases, you are crossing an individual of a dominant phenotype but unknown genotype to an individual that is homozygous recessive for all relevant genes. Because the "tester" individual makes one known type of gamete, the ratios of phenotypes among the progeny of the cross indicate the type and frequencies of gametes made by the individual with the unknown genotype. Once you know the gametes that this individual produces, you can "reconstruct" the individual's genotype.

Consider again the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and recall that the ebony-body allele (e) is recessive to the normal yellow-body allele (E), while the brown-eye allele (b) is recessive to the normal red-eye allele (B). If you are given a male with a yellow body and red eyes, how can you determine its genotype?

In this example, there are now four possible genotypes that are associated with the dominant phenotype of yellow body/red eyes. These four genotypes can produce one, two, two, and four different gametes, respectively (Table 3). Moreover, in combination with the single gamete from the "tester" parent, these gametes will produce one, two, two, or four progeny phenotypes.

Table 3: Possible Male Gametes and Their Frequency

Now, say you carry out the test cross and obtain 400 progeny. You sort these progeny by phenotype and discover that you have 200 flies with a yellow body and red eyes, as well as 200 progeny with a yellow body and brown eyes. These progeny must have the genotypes described in Table 4.

Table 4: Offspring Phenotype and Genotype and Corresponding Parental Gametes

You know that the homozygous recessive tester parent produces only one type of gamete (eb). Thus, the yellow-bodied, red-eyed progeny must be heterozygous at both loci (EeBb) due to the receipt of an EB allele from the unknown parent. Meanwhile, the yellow-bodied, brown-eyed progeny must be heterozygous at the body color locus but homozygous recessive at the eye color locus (Eebb). This could only happen if the progeny received an Eb gamete from the individual with the unknown genotype. Thus, you can deduce that the fly with the unknown genotype produced two types of gametes, EB and Eb, in equal frequencies. This means that you can reconstruct the fly's genotype as EEBb (case 2 in Table 3).

In sum, a test cross is a device that can be used to infer the Mendelian alleles present in parental gametes based on the observation of offspring phenotypes. Specifically, the ratio of phenotypes in a set of offspring reveals missing information about one of the parent's genotypes. Test crosses may also be used to determine whether two genes are linked, as well as to determine the underlying genotype if an allele's penetrance is less than 100%.

Daniel Schiappa is the Chief Product Officer at Arctic Wolf, a global leader in security operations.

A lengthy, stressful test is what comes to mind when most people hear the acronym SAT. But the other SAT—a security awareness training program—can also embody those qualities if it’s not managed correctly. It can cause just as many headaches for an organization fighting to mitigate phishing attacks and social engineering scams.

Phishing attacks, despite being mostly conducted via relatively ancient networking technologies in email and SMS, aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, trends show the opposite: A accurate survey they conducted found that 64% of global IT decision-makers still consider phishing one of their primary areas of concern, ranking just below ransomware as the top threat to an organization’s employees. With 82% of cyberattacks involving the human element in an organization, phishing is a low-risk, high-reward venture for attackers in even the most heavily monitored environments because it targets weaknesses in the humans behind the keyboard, rather than the application or device they’re using.

Combatting a crafty social engineering scam, then, requires security awareness training that engages employees with the most up-to-date social engineering schemes and tricks attackers have in their arsenal. All the money in the world that’s spent on shiny security tools can be rendered useless with one wrong click from an untrained employee. Employers are starting to recognize this, with nearly half of IT leaders they surveyed wanting to educate themselves further about phishing attacks in the coming year. Without that buy-in from IT leadership to create a strong culture around security, it’s unlikely that an organization will be able to develop a robust security awareness training program.

That culture, however, can’t be built in a day’s worth of training or phishing simulations—or even a week’s worth of lectures on social engineering scams. There is too much to learn about practicing good cyber hygiene to cram into a single training session, and new phishing scams are also constantly emerging that require new skills to defend against. Organizations that evolve their security awareness training curriculum regularly and keep it interesting for their employees are going to have a smarter security culture and, as a result, spend less time dealing with ransomware, malware and stolen credentials.

Personalizing and diversifying that educational security content by offering quizzes, games and tracking metrics for employees is one way to keep employees engaged in building cyber resilience. Security leaders can also tailor their security awareness training to their specific industry, like government, healthcare or financial services. A successful program also incorporates elements like peer-to-peer coaching, account takeovers and microlearning sessions to help employees recognize a social engineering scam before it happens. It’s encouraging that most organizations—62%, in fact, according to their survey—have IT leaders that are using some form of security awareness training to educate their employees, but there’s room for improvement.

Security doesn’t have to be as stressful as a standardized test for employees. A training format that empowers employees to take responsibility for their role in cybersecurity awareness can make an enormous difference to a company in avoiding all kinds of intrusions into their network. Utilize an ongoing program that offers training opportunities in small doses, as opposed to a multi-hour webinar requirement. Educate instead of assuming the worst; your employees inherently want to do the right thing—they don’t want to click on a malicious link, but they need the tools and education to know what to look for. Employees that are confident in their security awareness training will foster a strong security culture outside of mandatory curriculum as well, bolstering the long-term success of their organization.

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