The myth of perfection

If you happened to read the the previous entry, How to make a saint, and have given it any serious thought, you may very well have noticed a serious roadblock. That’s because once you’ve begun to believe that nothing is inconsequential and everything in your life is part of your legacy, stress begins to set in. How do I make sure everything I do is worthy to go in the record of my story? If you begin to imagine that all of your work is important, it becomes harder and harder to leave your work to posterity—until you are fully satisfied with it. It becomes difficult to let go, to finish things, to be satisfied with your work. So you end up with a growing stack of half-finished projects and ideas.

If you have experienced this creative paralysis, you are certainly not alone. French poet Paul Valéry said,

In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, of the book to the fire or to the public, whether due to weariness or to a need to deliver it for publication, is a sort of accident, comparable to the letting-go of an idea that has become so tiring or annoying that one has lost all interest in it.¹Many, many other writers have echoed this sentiment.

Writers talk about this experience quite a lot—but I think all creators can identify with the experience Valéry describes. You are simply too unsatisfied with your work. You just can’t seem to get it. just. right. There is always still something lacking.

Beginning with imperfection

For me, this is especially true with writing, but it also comes up in other media, like web design. And because a blog is really just writing and web design, I’m willing to call it a minor miracle that you are reading this right now. I’m not thrilled to admit that St. Belletrist was stuck in creative limbo for almost five years. I had several legitimate reasons for this delay, but a part of me still wonders if any of those reasons would have really mattered so much, had it not been for perfectionism. I’m not beating myself up about this, because that was five years of growing and lessons learned, which St. Belletrist has benefitted from. One of those lessons came when I was in the middle of designing the website.

Somewhere between putting (what I thought were) the finishing touches on the CSS and then wondering just how much PHP I’d need to learn in order to make the website I really wanted, I realized that this project would go on ad infinitum if I let it. There would always be a decision to rethink and another functionality to add. I realized that if St. Belletrist were ever to be more than a collection of files hidden on my hard drive, it would mean hitting publish on something that still felt in some way incomplete or unsatisfactory to me. I knew that beginning at all would mean beginning with imperfection.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism seems to be particularly infamous right now. It’s the character flaw that everyone loves to hate. But I’m not particularly fond of the two major ways that I hear it talked about:

1. Perfectionism as mental disorder or addiction.²“Hi, my name is Bethany. And I’m a perfectionist. It has been nine days since I last stared at two virtually identical photos for ten minutes, trying to decide which color treatment looked the best.”
2. Perfectionism as a mark of distinction for the gifted artist. (Humble-bragging optional, but recommended).³A subtype of this is “perfectionism as a smokescreen or enabler for laziness,” of which I am absolutely guilty. Sometimes it’s more laziness than perfectionism, and other times you just wear yourself out, simply thinking through your own high expectations. First world problems.

The problem with these descriptions is that perfectionism isn’t abnormal and it isn’t special. I actually think it’s very normal to experience perfectionism, if you:

1. Are not currently experiencing a major depressive episode, and
2. Take pride in your work.

People who have goals are people who have visualized an ideal end result—an end result that might be outside of their ability. Striving for perfection is only human—It also happens to be very counterproductive in excess. The usual antidote for perfectionism runs something along the lines of “Perfection can’t be achieved, so don’t beat yourself up trying for it, and it’s really okay to not be perfect.” This is very true. But maybe lowering our standards isn’t the best approach. Maybe before we give up on reaching perfection, we should ask What is perfection? And is it really what we want?

What is perfection?

Perfection almost seems too obvious to need a definition. But if it truly has such a power over all of us, then shouldn’t we know exactly what we’re aiming for? Perfection has sort of become a magical Mary Poppins carpet bag, with infinite space to hold all of our aspirations and dreams, but the word is actually very finite in definition. English and many other languages have inherited a word for perfection, coming from Latin perfectio, and the verb perficere, which means “to finish” or “to complete.”

How delightfully ironic. This thing, which we have blamed for missed deadlines and stalled ideas and projects with no end in sight—simply means to finish. Let us pause to soak up the cruel irony.

Of course, words change over time and meanings shift, so it’s not quite as simple as that. If you are up for a fun etymological jaunt, take a perusal of the varied dictionary definitions of perfect and perfection. Interestingly, philosophers since antiquity have put considerable thought into defining and understanding perfection.⁴Interestingly, most of the literature on perfection comes from the fields of theology and aesthetics. These are two different dimensions of perfection (spiritual perfection of the soul vs. aesthetic perfection), but it is an interesting intersection that doesn’t come up nearly as often as it used to. And surprisingly, many of these still ring very true with modern definitions. For example, Aristotle in his Metaphysics⁵All quotations of Aristotle are from Metaphysics: Books Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon by Aristotle and Christopher Kirwan (1971). gives three qualifications for perfection,⁶The Greek word Aristotle uses, which correlates to perfection is “teleios,” meaning “completed, ended, entire.” which are worth considering. According to Aristotle, there were three different ways in which something might achieve perfection.

Which perfection?

Many times when we talk about “perfection” we are using Aristotle’s first definition: complete, finished, not lacking anything. Anyone who has ever lost the instructions from a package of IKEA furniture knows how vitally important it is to not lack anything. But on the other hand, think about how little that is actually saying. All the pieces are accounted for. Nothing is missing. Everything’s in order. If you’re putting together a puzzle or rebuilding a car engine that means a lot. But if you’re telling a story or painting a portrait or writing a song, that’s not such a great test for success. You can talk about a story that isn’t missing any relevant parts, but how much is that really saying? When I think of my favorite books and the first words of praise I’d assign to any of them, it wouldn’t be that they are complete or that everything’s in the right place. That may be true, but that’s not what makes a book memorable. How many books are “complete” and utterly forgettable? So, in a certain context, perfection is actually not all that remarkable.

You may be thinking that this first definition of perfection is not what you mean by the word and instead prefer Aristotle’s second definition: something which is the best of its kind or which is in no way deficient. Again, this is a beautiful idea—but once you start working off of it, you run into a problem. Is it really enough to be able to say that your work is the best there is? That sounds great. But the thing about relative terms like better and best, is that they don’t always mean all that we take them to mean. The best is always determined by the rest. So if the rest are terrible, then the best is…only less terrible.

Aristotle even points out that “perfection” in the second type is not even necessarily a good thing: “transferring it to the case of bad things, we speak of a complete scandalmonger and a complete thief—as indeed we even call them good: a good thief and a good scandalmonger.” The kind of perfection that surpasses all others doesn’t even have to be good in any definitive sense.

Finally, there is Aristotle’s third type, which is the most interesting to me. Unlike the previous two, this definition shifts focus away from what something is to what it does (but more on that later). Perfection is not in what something embodies but what it accomplishes. Returning to car engines and IKEA furniture, this is a very workable definition. But I think it still works with artistic endeavours.

The search continues

But do any of the three types feel like what you mean when you say perfection? Perhaps not. More than official dictionary definitions, I am interested in finding out what we mean when we think of perfection, as artists and creators. And I believe there’s another, non-traditional definition of perfection that a lot of us have internalized—a definition which goes far beyond being complete or best or useful. I think this is the definition which bogs down artists, delays projects, and paralyzes the otherwise ambitious and energetic. For this we have to continue the search for perfection outside of the dictionary—in part two of this entry.