Don't Be The Wizard
“Pobody’s Nerfect!” -Eleanor, as played by Kristen Bell, The Good Place
The need for things to be perfect has been one of my greatest excuses of all time. It’s helped me procrastinate. It’s led me to quit doing things that I loved. It’s just been all around pretty terrible. What’s funny is that sometimes the drive for perfection helps me end up with subpar results.
It seems that the worry of needing something to be perfect causes me to have great enough anxiety that I keep putting off the work until it’s too close to the deadline and then I rush it over the finish line. Other times, I keep trying again and again for perfection and finally give up and toss a half-hearted project over that same finish line. In the past, this has been incredibly discouraging.
A long time ago I read somewhere about the philosophical idea that “perfect is the enemy of good” and it didn’t even resonate with me a little bit. Instead, I scoffed at the idea and thought about how that idea was for people who didn’t care about something being great and instead were happy living with good enough.
It really wasn’t until the last couple of years that it started to sink into my thick skull. The more I had become self aware of my own weaknesses, the more I started to see how stubborn I had been all those years. From there, through a lot of self reflection, I learned something that changed the way that I thought about perfectionism. Here’s the fundamental truth that I have come to learn about the quest for perfection.
Perfectionism makes the attainable, unreachable.
That is the cold hard fact in all of this. We can pretend it’s not true, but in the end, we will indeed find that without being okay with the fact that no single thing we do will ever be truly perfect, we will not be successful.
So what do we do with that knowledge? That’s a question that I love asking in my articles because just knowing something, doesn’t me we know how to apply it. As I stated in my last article, sometimes just getting your ideas out of your brain quickly can help a lot. That’s partially because when we keep idolizing our ideas, they become better than we think they are and can unreasonably raise our expectations to a level that we will never be able to achieve.
But I think another good piece of advice is one that I follow myself, every single week when I write these articles and release them into the wild. Most of these articles are written on the fly solely based on my own experience. I don’t pretend to be an expert; instead, I talk about what has worked for me and what I have seen work for others. I’m generally not presenting you with loads of evidence, but simply these ideas, brought to you via my own lens.
The idea of writing a weekly blog once terrified me because I felt like every single article would have to change the world. But that is completely unrealistic. And I freely admit that doing this weekly means that not every article is the best thing I have ever written. I certainly stand by each of them but wouldn’t call a single one of them perfection.
And I am okay with that.
And that finally brings me to the title of this article. When you live for perfectionism, you become like the Wizard of Oz. You’re simply hiding behind a curtain hoping that no one sees the process, only the perfection at the end. I’m trying my best to open the curtain and not be afraid to show everyone that I am simply a professor, not a wizard. I invite you to do the same.
-Jason