Mar 28 2008
Perfect Release
One of my favorite chapters in my ebook, ‘The Power of Release,’ is entitled ‘Perfect Release.’ And considering the feedback I’ve gotten from this particular chapter, it’a a crowd favorite, too. Here’s just one reference to that chapter from Victoria Silva. Victoria is the creator of feminineliving.com, and she shared this with me:
“One chapter in particular rang so true for me – the chapter on Releasing Perfection. Now I can see with clarity how my need for perfection has kept me stuck in so many areas of my life…but NO MORE. I released my need to be perfect after reading this chapter, and I feel like a BIG trash bag has been lifted from my once heavy shoulders. This is a MUST READ for anyone wanting to move forward in their lives.”
I really appreciate Victoria’s response to this chapter, because it was just the response I was envisioning as I wrote it. Let me share a brief excerpt from the chapter below.
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You must release perfection.
If you find yourself always longing for your envisioned concept of perfection, you must release that concept before you can really begin to live.
Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Waiting for perfection – the perfect relationship, the perfect house, the perfect situation – is robbing you of joy and time and satisfaction.
Perfection is robbing you of your life.
Because, what is life, except how you spend your minutes, hours, and days? And, if you are spending an inordinate amount of that time lamenting that your life isn’t perfect or that you aren’t perfect, you are wasting a life that, while not perfect, could very well be spectacular.
So, forget “perfection” – instead, celebrate “spectacular.”
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That unattainable concept of perfection gives us a warped sense of how our lives should be. We hold ourselves to a standard that is unachievable – a standard that keeps us frustrated and depressed. And it doesn’t just affect the way we feel, it affects what we accomplish. And it also affects our relationships, as we hold people to a standard that they can never live up to.
It’s all in the ‘Perfect Release’ chapter in ‘The Power of Release.’
In a few days, I’ll share another bit of information from my amazing compilation ebook, ‘Masters of Release.’ I haven’t decided which of the 10 Release Masters will be featured next (I’ve already covered Pat O’Bryan’s chapter in a previous post), but whatever I share from that book is guaranteed to be choice, life enhancing material. Each time I read it, I learn something new – something that enhances my ability to release the stuff that gets in the way of my progress.
So, be on the lookout for that post, and, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email me – buz@viralhappiness.com .
7 responses so far
Hi Buz–Never have I been into perfection.
But I think everything is perfect.
Ah the ironies of life are –perfect!!!
Love to all–
Kate Loving Shenk
Hi… great timing of this topic for me! Perfectionism is alive and well… and it has refused any attempts this week to sit in the corner! And have a break!… so this post has given me encouragement and motivation to push perfectionism to one side (preferably into another country) and just get on and do!
Thanks Buz…
Jeanne
http://www.goalsnaspirations.com
Hey
It’s really true that perfectionism prevents people from fulfilling their dreams step by step. Hopefully, some perfectionists will read your post and change.
For me, I changed a little while before concerning my blog. I wanted to start with a perfect blog and to go from 0 to 100.
Therefore I didn’t start for months. Now I did one which is growing and improving and exactly these attributes make it perfect. Isn’t perfectionism in a perpetual growth and improvement? I think so and I conclude with a quotation:
“When you change the look at things the things you look at will change.”
(Means: See it as perfect and it will be perfect!)
Best wishes,
Mira
http://gimmeasmile.wordpress.com
Great comments! Congratulations to all of you for not allowing perfectionism to stifle your progress.
Was it John Lennon that said “life is what happens when we are busy making plans”? I think that quote sums up the unproductive actions we all take from time to time making these grand blueprints that never are acted upon. I have been trying to be more of a Ready,Fire, Aim kinda guy because it seems to me that the more things we attempt in life and fail the more things we just might get right . Thanks Buzz!
Hi
I’ve read your post with great interest, as I’m someone who’s often been accused of “perfectionism” — in design of various kinds — and always thought that my accusers were missing the point of what I was trying to do.
To me, there was no such thing as “perfection”: only a myriad ways (maybe) of “resolving” some design issue (in architectural or graphic design) as seen in a “problem-solving” frame of mind, where creativity is the real issue. This is most easily understood in the context of architectural design, where a large number of different and often conflicting factors need somehow to be reconciled in a way which does justice to each — without going overboard for a few at the expense of the rest. (The going-overboard approach is one which often wins awards for a showy result, most likely to be detested by users.) This design “process” can take almost endless exploration of possibilities, limited only by dissatisfaction and the time available to come up with something final.
I could understand that, to my accusers, my dissatisfaction with most alternatives arrived at en route suggested a search for the “perfection” which for me didn’t exist. Easier options which satisfied them, didn’t satisfy me. And most of such options proved to be circumscribed by early decisions on design parameters which correspondingly limited the range of possible outcomes — none of them, to me, good “enough”. And I make NO apology for this apparent search for the impossible. What was of greatest interest to me was that typically, I’d only reach some breakthrough concept by working through endless alternatives — and then giving up in near-despair: nothing really worked!
It was almost invariably the giving-up that enabled the final “good enough” answer to arrive, as something often radically different from any of my previous logically arrived at answers. Something had to give: some precious preconception of important design relationships abandoned. And it was only after giving up that this would finally happen.
BUT, the important thing was that without this previous slogging through all the more narrowly conceived permutations, I would not have been able to recognise the “best” answer when it finally arrived. Breakthroughs of this kind, in my experience, are not achievable without the necessary preliminary work to get past early but limited ideas and less than optimum outcomes. There is no direct route, no short-cut.
I find it fascinating that truly creative outcomes often happen in this way, even in the area of scientific research. For example, in the discovery of the molecular structure of the benzene ring — which laid the foundation for subsequent work in organic chemistry — the research biochemist Kekhule first slogged through all the structures he could imagine, before giving up. He then dreamt about a serpent with its tail in its mouth. And on waking, he understood in a flash that this was the structure he’d been looking for.
The man who designed the first efficient sewing machine (I forget his name — Singer?) had a similar experience. With a traditional needle, he got very bad results. Then he dreamt about an aboriginal tribe holding spears, oddly with a hole in the tip of each spear. He suddenly realised that this was the answer: a sewing machine needle with a hole in its tip, unlike traditional needles with the hole at the opposite end to the tip. It set the pattern for all future sewing machines.
So I learnt to beware of the dismissive label “perfectionist” applied by others who might not understand what it was I was trying to achieve. And in terms of graphic design, suddenly the light dawned on me about this too. Instead of feeling very annoyed at being the recipient of this put-down label — gratuitously bestowed most often by non-paying clients who felt guilty when they learnt about the time required — I learnt to thank them! For recognising that it took “perfectionism” to do this kind of thing well, or at all. It was a gratifying form of “reframing” that not only rejected the insult and transformed it into (albeit involuntary!) praise, but might even have got them to think a little harder too.
People who do not themselves possess various skills often think it takes “just” a few minutes to “dash off” something that in reality takes many hours, days or weeks (or ultimately, years of experience). “Will you just do this”, they tend to ask — which used to arouse my fury, said near midnight for a printers’ deadline at 9am! Newspaper cartoonists in particular suffer from this form of abuse. . . And I was reassured about my own reaction when I read the complaint of a well-known cartoonist at how often it happened to him.
Within the sphere of creative work, at least, there’s “perfectionism” as seen and not understood by others, about hard work leading to real achievement, an ultimately self-rewarding process with its own integrity. Again, I was reassured by reading only a week or so ago the confession of an acclaimed British architect that he always had to get through a long “doubt and despair” stage before he arrived at anything that truly satisfied him — and then satisfied users. Such honesty is unusual. And it also helps to dispel the commonly held illusion that innate “talent” is responsible for fast and effortless answers. The truth, much more often, is that anyone can have “talent”: but how many people develop it? A modicum of talent plus long and hard won experience from much application, plus dedication, is what REALLY leads to quality achievements. So who cares if it’s seen as “perfectionism”? It’s a label that doesn’t bother me any longer. (But I still get very annoyed at having years of learning-by-doing dismissed, as I see it, as “talent!)
And finally, in distinguishing between “perfectionism” (as a narrowly conventional perception) and creativity, I’ve been enormously helped by the idea that real creativity demands a “high tolerance of chaos”. This can apply to literal chaos — like tolerating the current state of my house while unable to decide which of numerous possibilities I prefer in how to use it (and without moving furniture up and down five flights of stairs to test each of them!). Or, more broadly, as a high tolerance for doubt, difficulty and even despair without loss of basic confidence. Many years ago, I arrived at this realisation intuitively (long before I came across it usefully labelled as “tolerance of chaos”). It seemed to me to take almost a kind of arrogance to refuse to be satisfied with easy or conventional answers, determined to find something “better”, which to me, represented merely “good enough”. Such “chaos” extended to being unable even to define what the “real” design issue was, except by exploring far enough to discover what it wasn’t.
It’s hard to explain this except by reference to an actual problem, as a third year student, which still sticks in my mind: how to detail concrete panels for an industrialised system of concrete panels for a school design. All I knew was that for such a boring construction method, aesthetics mattered, but the biggest problem tended to be rainwater leaks. After all kinds of aesthetic experiments requiring tortuous kinks and bends in damp-proof membranes, none of them, for various reasons, seemed to be a “good enough” answer. And after being up all night (as usual), light suddenly dawned around an hour before I was due to pin up my “finished” drawings for criticism — but I was still doing exploratory sketches! At last I made the damp-proof membrane a flat continuous sheet: and miracle — no more problems. It remains a mystery to me why I’d been unable to see the blindingly obvious “answer” much sooner. Then I found that none of 35 other students had seen it at all. . .
So even my “arrogance”, I finally understood, was actually a reasonable vote of confidence in my ability, signalled by dissatisfaction itself. And though dissatisfaction is no magic guarantee that one will, in the end, arrive at anything better, even this failure acts as a signal that something previously discarded will, after all, have to be “good enough”. But not for want of trying to surpass it.
All this is to say that I think “happiness” is a more complex affair than a sustained moment-to-moment satisfaction. It can legitimately include chaos, difficulty, doubt and even despair, and persistence in the face of distrust, envy or criticism — all arising from an underlying confidence that certain kinds of effort are worthwhile. And if such efforts don’t get you to a “better” place then so what: it wasn’t for lack of trying. Knowing when to give up is wisdom gained. Only the total abandonment of self-confidence and a feeling of self-worth — that it’s not worth trying at all — is a real killer.
Gabriel,
You, my friend, know how to comment! Are you blogging? If you’re not, you should start. Your comments are exceptionally well thought out and splendidly presented.
If I may quote you: “…I think ‘happiness’ is a more complex affair than a sustained moment-to-moment satisfaction.” Very well put. The striving and effort and, at times, the setbacks, are all worthwhile, too.
Thanks for a great comment!
Buz