Striving for perfection

The journey, striving for perfection, is riddled with a variety of contradicting emotions. At the outset, it boosts your ego that you are not an average mortal settling down as ‘also rans,’ but you wished to be, at least wished to be known as, a perfectionist, whether the goal is education, work, the pursuit of a hobby, etc. But in reality, you are stressed out, lonely in your journey, and often nurse a doubt whether it is worth the while.

Management gurus have a different story on perfection. They say you end up spending disproportionately more efforts and resources in the last mile of perfection than what you did for the journey till then. Zero defects may be a lot more costly than, say, a little bit defective, and may not be worth the effort.

There is also another statistical side to the argument called the ninety-ten effect, meaning it is the 10 per cent that leads to the 90 per cent of success stories. It is only ten people who contribute to the overall. Stretching a bit more, it is only a little of all the items you have that amounts to total value. Then why bother and sweat to perfect the overall? This applies across the universe, whether it be human efforts or natural occurrences; most efforts are ineffective, however much you may aim at overall perfection, meaning while your goal can be perfection, the means are always wayward mostly.

So, when things are not entirely in your hand, you can’t be going about working on perfection without incurring disproportionate costs, not to mention disappointments. The added misery is that we create disgruntled relatives, friends, colleagues, and employees and try to find fault with them for what they ought to have achieved but haven’t in our superior wisdom. We sit in judgement on others, which is universally forbidden. A great sports leader is known to get the best of his teammates, whatever they willingly give, and not demand what he thinks is perfect. Then what is striving for perfection?

Confine it to yourself, not to perfecting the world or thereabouts. The pyramid of Maslow’s talks about self-actualisation in your chosen pursuit. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and Albert Einstein focused on their own goals of perfection instead of going about perfecting others. The journey is as glorious, enjoyable, and fulfilling as the goal.