Irritability, bad moods, and outbursts of affect are classic symptoms of chronic virtuousness.

Carl Jung

Sticklers are people who can’t help but be serious, orderly and neat.  

Sticklers can’t help but have clean and tidy houses. Before they leave to go to work, they dust and straighten things. They bring out the big guns before they have visitors. It’s important for everyone to know they are clean and orderly. Rubbish will be carefully separated. The back of the fridge will be sparkling. There will always be extra rolls of toilet paper.

Sticklers set a high bar for themselves. They might find it a little hard to relax until they have ‘finished all their tasks.’  Once everything is perfect and good and in the right place, they don’t relax much, they think ‘ok, now let’s keep up this standard forever.’

The Stickler doesn’t realize that they will never be able to make everything perfect and good. In fact, measuring and judging makes things worse. You can easily ruin a dish, a drawing or a friend with harsh criticism and high standards.

The Stickler is constantly dissatisfied with the present moment. There’s always something a little bit wrong that catches their attention. A little cut on their finger. A certain smell. A piece of work that is not quite finished. A little stain on their shoes. The obvious fact that life is a mess doesn’t relieve the stickler. Instead, it makes them exasperated and frustrated.

Samurais are Sticklers. They follow strict guidelines and view themselves as honest and orderly. They really believe there is a perfect way to do anything and everything. In the film Seven Samurai, the samurai ‘Kyuzo’ initially refuses to join the team because ‘he’s not interested in killing, only in perfecting his skill.’ Once he comes onboard, he’s quiet and effective, but seems unsatisfied with his work. He comes across as the most judgmental and righteous of the bunch. 

Sticklers get on each others nerves. It’s one thing to be punctual, but when everyone is punctual it’s a bit too much. It’s hard to rationalize all the neatness when they see someone else do it. They don’t want to be surrounded by neat-freaks, they prefer to keep their neat-freakness to themselves. I think that’s because it’s hard to feel like a saint when you are surrounded by them.

Sticklers feel guilty and freak out when they lose control over their saintly self-image. They can easily get angry, but since being angry isn’t very virtuous, they have trouble admitting to and owning that emotion. All that energy needs somewhere to go, and usually gets placed onto whatever is closet to them – A collegue, a partner or the tomato they are chopping up.

Sticklers can be angry, but even more so judgmental. The Stickler has weighed up, judged and critiqued every molecule of their being before they have even gotten out of bed. Once they have finished with themselves, they move onto anyone or anything else in their close vicinity. A housefly isn’t safe from the Sticklers’ endless campaign of criticism. By midday, they can feel like a broiling cauldron of negativity and are not that fun to be around. 

The Stickler is happy if they can avoid anything that makes them look bad. It’s healthy if a Stickler can get in the habit of sharing something quickly, roughly and ultimately imperfect. If a Stickler has retreated into private and is working on getting something ‘just right’, you know they need to come back to reality. For designers, showing your work all the time is critical to a good design process. As Bob Baxley, a former design leader at Apple says, “If you ever found yourself sitting at your desk by yourself with your headphones on, stressing ’cause you felt like you had to figure it out on your own, something was really broken.” This is good advice for Sticklers.

Is there any hope for someone like this? Nature can serve as a partial antidote for a Stickler. If they can occasionally ignore their neat-freakiness and step outside, they’ll find a whole bunch of leaves, dirt, mud and water that ultimately can’t be ordered in any ‘right’ way. A tree can only be a tree. Same goes with a mouse or a stick insect. Nature, as Jung puts it, “harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can.”

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