Do you ever remember being told off by a music teacher or sports coach that you weren’t practicing enough?
“Practice makes perfect,” they’d say. But does it? Has anyone ever been perfect at anything?
Perfection is an unobtainable goal. That’s why perfectionists are often such highly-strung people; there is no way for them to live up to their goals.
In fact, if we can’t hope to achieve it, the pursuit of perfection becomes damaging in itself.
History abounds with those to fought to live an impeccable life, to achieve an impossible goal and who left behind them broken homes, families and lives that could have been so happy.
What we need is not to try to make ourselves perfect, but to ackowledge that we can always be better.
Rather than seeing the impossibility of perfection, we should see the opportunity it presents. It means we can always be moving forward, always be improving, always be better tomorrow than we are today.
That is what we should strive for. Not to make ourselves perfection personified, but to inhabit a life where we understand our imperfections and work tirelessly to make ourselves better, to be more, to think bigger and to reach higher.
Only when we stop chasing pointless perfection can we truly understand what we are capable of.