500 Words a Week - Perfection, the Hand-brake to Progress

“Our image of perfection is the reason we reject ourselves.” – Don Miguel Ruiz

There are a few threads of reasoning why I’m beginning to see perfection as more harmful than beneficial. In the first circumstance, it stops us from accomplishing anything, from starting anything, from pursuing something new. As we believe we will be poor at it, we won’t be perfect. We wait until we believe we have the perfect idea, the perfect programme, the perfect circumstance before implementing or starting something. Rather than iterating and rolling with the punches. Just start, learn on the go.

You’re given a finite number of resources to develop an app. Do you spend all those resources in waiting until you believe you have the perfect app before releasing it? Or do you quickly create something, release it to get feedback, so then you still have resources to use to improve it? In the first case, after spending all your resources waiting for the app to be perfect, upon releasing you get feedback around things to change, you’ve got nothing left to change it. This is how we can view our time. Time is our finite resource. Time spent worrying around perfection is wasted. Time spent waiting until you deem the circumstance to be right is wasted. A better use of our time is to push forward with what we want to do and learn on the journey.

A second circumstance in how I feel perfection to be harmful relates to the quote at the beginning of this piece. By all means we should have something to strive towards, but if everything is so wrapped up in aiming at this perfect picture we have in our head and it causes us to feel miserable in the current moment maybe we need to rethink. Perfection is something that we are constantly surrounded by, on social media, we see the perfect people, leading perfect lives when in reality no one experiences it like that. Yet it’s portrayed that way, causing us to feel inadequate about our situation and crave perfection. We have an image of what perfection is in our head, and we can never measure up to that idea, causing these feels of rejecting ourselves. Causing us to live our life’s based on other people’s opinions, for fear of not being accepted or not being good enough.

“Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear to taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans.” – Don Miguel Ruiz