A Perspective on striving to be PERFECT
Recently I’ve been reading a book “Steal like an Artist” by Austin Kleon.
Today I was reading a chapter in which Austin was talking about the not-so-secret formula to be known. He broke it down into 2 major things:
\>do good work
\>share it with people
And I got to thinking, we humans like to overcomplicate stuff a little too much. We tend to think over a post to the extent that we don’t want to post thinking it’s not “good enough”. We strive to be perfect when the only thing that makes us us is our imperfections. Don’t get me wrong, striving to be perfect isn’t a bad thing and one should definitely have that motivation to be better, but when you start to beat yourself up everytime you get something wrong is where the problem begins. There is a beautiful quote in the book that says:
“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique”
This one hit home, it’s powerful in the sense that it gives so much perspective about the things that go wrong when we try to do something.
Talking about doing something
later in the same chapter, the book had a great illustration of “Life of a Project” which very well demonstrates the thought process every person goes through when trying to build any project.
And seeing this, I was a little taken aback not because this is me everytime I start a project, but one part of me didn’t believe that it was such a widely known thing.
So, I was there sitting and wondering why it happens and here’s what I thought: I feel that whenever we think of an idea, we are fueled with enthusiasm and the excitement doing something that is going to help other people And then when we actually start to do the thing, we realise that the thing that we’re trying to accomplish requires a version of ourself that’s not available yet, it requires us to level up. We have to learn new things, we have to face obstacles, it all gradually decays the enthusiasm we felt at the beginning But at the lowest bottom, where the author refers to it as Dark Knight of the Soul, that’s when that feeling of giving up is at the peak (that’s where majority of people give up btw) When we overcome that and we say “No way, i’m going to do it anyways”, is where the magic happens. For some reason the things you found difficult before, seem simple to you and even if the output of the project isn’t that refined as you initially hoped for, you’ll be happy. And this happiness is that sense of accomplishment that you were so excited about.
It is all about a perspective, this is what I took from the book in whatever way my mind was capable to. hell, I didn’t even know i would write this much tbh, but here we are lol. If it helped you in any way, do share this so you can help others too :)
