The word “perfection” derives from the Latin word “perfectio”, which simply means to finish, yeah, it’s such a simple word and yet we have made it so much complicated. To give some perspective about my obsession with perfectionism, it took me around 30 months to put my ass back on the chair and actually start writing something because all this time I had been wondering that whatever I am going to write next is going to be simply perfect and after reading people should be like “Hey Siddhant when is your next blog coming?” or “When are you publishing your book?” I am highlighting my case here but I guess it might be true for some more people who wish to try out new things. Recently, I have come to this term that most of the homo sapiens are usually irrational and often require some external mechanism that helps them to understand the situation in a better way and this is what the following article aims for, it will give you a couple of points to reflect for yourself and help understand that whether the baggage of being perfect is impeding in your way.
I usually read a lot of articles and stories from various sources like Medium, newspapers or some other personal blogpost and as a result I have come across some really fantastic literary works. One fine day I realized that most of these fantastic works usually came from very successful writers, bloggers who were writing for quite some time, and then there used to be an equal number of articles that I did not find that fascinating and they used to be generally from relatively infamous or new writers who had started to write very recently. As a very human thing the very next thing that used to come to my mind was why they are writing at all or even in some cases I used to wonder how did they even dared to upload such a piece of work. But as I started to follow their work, I saw significant improvement in their writing and all of a sudden from nowhere their writing started to leave a mark on me. One odd day after reading one of the articles that simply left me awestruck, I started to view the entire situation from a human perspective and came up with two possible explanations, first one had to do with my attitude while reading those articles and the second one involved not giving a shit about perfectionism. I will talk about the first point in some later story and would like to briefly touch on the second point here.
I will try to reason from a writer perspective or more specifically write about what was stopping me from going ahead. Since I had craved for quite a long time to write something on my own, the realization gave me a good lesson and also motivated me to go ahead and write something. When we target perfectionism, the heavy baggage of expectation from ourselves starts to build on and whenever we even think of going ahead and making things happen, the baggage of perfectionism pulls us down and we end up doing nothing at all. Having expectations from oneself is good and as the famous quote goes “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”. But simply adding a pillar of perfectionism to your expectation does more harm than what we can think of, it starts to threaten your mind that you will never be able to achieve it and it’s true you cannot achieve perfection as nobody knows what perfection is, it might mean something to you while something completely different for another individual. Instead, we should try and set our minds on more meaningful goals like, I will complete this piece no matter what the outcome comes out. How will this affirmation help you; I cannot say it for you but surely it helped me to a large extent and the post you are currently reading is the result of that only. Because once you sit down with the goal to finish the task you have got no other option left, initially you might feel like no I should just leave it as I don’t think it’s worth the effort and what I would end up will be very poor and will not gather appreciation, but at that very moment you will have to remind yourself that gaining appreciation or putting out a perfect outcome is not my aim at all and I have to simply complete the task and live with peace with myself. And once you pass your internal conflict its simply liberating at first and then you also start to realize that you are not only progressing and completing the task but are also trying to improve it at every level along the way as the baggage of perfectionism is simply no more bothering you and all you are left with you and your craft.
I have tried to take an example of writing here to explain my situation but they can be interpolated to any activity in our day-to-day life. I recently came across a video where they talked about how you can become perfect in a true sense. The idea is to stop when you feel that you are 80% done, and leave the remaining 20% because that’s what takes up most of our time and energy and usually leaves us with a very little that can be gauged for. I am sure people will contradict with me here and I understand there point but if you are starting something new and are stuck up in the last 20%, it’s better to leave the piece there and start on a new piece and keep on doing it until you realize that the last bits do not matter and the learning you got while doing new things over and over have far exceeded the loss that you had incurred initially by giving up on the last 20%. And if you get to that stage, you will also realize that your work has gone way further from your initial perfection point.
Achieving perfection is an iterative process that involves a lot of setbacks and learning and just to sound a bit geeky it’s like a point that converges at infinity. So, next time you try to do something, don’t aim for perfection, instead take a moment to go over the work you have done already, have the courage and the right attitude to accept the mistakes that you had made earlier and simply try not to repeat them over again and I can assure you that what will come out will be something you would have not imagined while starting. Until then, “Don't aim for perfect, aim for complete. Perfection is an unattainable illusion”