Striving for perfection won’t help you achieve your goals. Taking committed action and doing what you believe in will help you to live the life you want to lead.
‘Your day’s work might turn out to have been a mess. So what? Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.’
In ACT, we don’t spout perfectionist slogans like ‘never quit’, ‘never give up’, ‘always do your best’. They sound good in theory, but in reality, no human can possibly live up to these ideals. The philosopher Haridas Chaudhuri said it succinctly: ‘The greater the emphasis on perfection, the further it recedes.’
In ACT, we encourage acceptance of the reality that we’re all imperfect – and yes, there will be times that we quit, give up, or get lost. And at the same time we also encourage commitment: to get better at staying on track for longer periods, better at catching ourselves when we go off course, and better at starting again from where we are.
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