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Be amazing, not perfect.
Be amazing, not perfect.
I came across this statement last week and it resonated with me. In fact, I thought it was actually too good not to share.
I get tired of advertisers who try to sell consumers a 'perfect this,' or 'perfect that.' Who are they to know what we define as perfection? How simplistic to presume that consumerism is the answer.
How often do we compare ourselves to one another, in a meaningless race of 'I wish I'd thought of that' or 'if only I had done it like that?' How commonly do we burn the metaphorical candle at both ends to get a task or project done so that it's a little closer to 'perfect,' only to find that someone reads it and spots a spelling mistake on page seven; suddenly it's not 'perfect' any more!
Are we measuring the wrong thing? What if the true notion of perfection is a holistic one - a sense of balance in all aspects of our lives (including sleeping sufficiently and worrying less)?
Probably many of us - and I count myself in that number - treat success as an on/off switch, with the only binary outcomes being perfection and failure. If we think like this, the inevitable way to evaluate the project with its spelling mistake (that I mentioned earlier) would be as a failure.
How disempowering!
How dismissive of the planning, research, drafting, re-drafting, proof reading, editing, thinking, reflection and everything else that happened during its production - and that's without mentioning the effort put in.
If we talk to ourselves like this, we most likely mark all our own work as inadequate.
Yes, of course we can learn from our mistakes - that is part of what makes us human, intelligent and with an innate ability to learn. However, learning does not require us to be unkind to ourselves in the process.
No, instead success is a continuum, with complete failure at one end and absolute perfection at the other.
I'd warrant that we spend the vast majority of our time well within those two ends of the spectrum, but the trick is to remember that when we experience bumps and potholes in the imperfect road we travel.
