Familiar with the quote – ‘Perfection is the Enemy of Good’ – by Voltaire? If you are like most, you would believe that having heard, read or known something that holds wisdom, we automatically imbibe that in our life. Let me call out a misconception first – we don’t change by knowing things, we change by – BEing it.
This robber – ‘a pattern for perfection’ – surfaced in my life during a mindfulness retreat. And it took a courageous heart, to acknowledge it’s existence; because the misplaced belief that ‘I was ok with imperfection’dug deep too, and removing that felt I was pulling out talons from my skin.
Well hell, after all my messy table made me believe all these years that “I was ok with imperfection”! The mess there turned out to be a mask to avoid seeing a pattern which was still prevalent in some parts of my life. That is how the thug of perfection was fooling me – because it had taken me to a level of believing that now I am a ‘perfect imperfect’ self – the one that knows perfectly well that perfection is the enemy of good. And needs no help – thank you very much!
The revelation that I was hooked onto the “pattern of perfection” in some areas of my life – happened when “patterns of procrastination” on a certain project I was working on – emerged.
So here is what I learned during the process of revelation –
Moving from perfection to progress – is not a strategic process. And if it is, the only strategy that works is – to “stop thinking” about it, and instead start ‘acting on it’ with courage. I learned through this process of revelation that – the more we allow time to pass between an inspired idea and executing it, the more of the inspiration we lose. The key is to jump working on an inspired idea immediately.
If the mind wants to play safe, indulging in idea testing can be a garb in disguise for allowing the robber of perfection into your house. Instead, believe in testing small executions, and then working on learnings thereon. Let the process flow.
I also realized that everything is pulsing with life force – including the ideas we have – from writing a book, creating a video, publishing an article or bringing to life a business idea. It has come to us because it is attracted to our pure primal spirit, not our conditioned mind. It is already carrying the energy of creativity and fruition. The more time we spend thinking over it, instead of birthing it – the more of the life force we suck out of it.
Finally, I remembered that our life purpose is really to honor our “wants”- to create something. If we don’t, a part of our creative spirit feels disengaged, and overtime, when we fall into this pattern, a feeling of dispiritedness, becomes a mood for life, blocking our ability to remain curious and joyful which are the gateways to creativity and miracles.
Procrastination has no place in the lives of conscious living and leadership. The only way through this is to remove the mask of the ‘robber of perfection’, by noticing the ‘behaviors of procrastination’; and then collapsing the time gap continuum from inspiration to action.
The robber of “perfection” lives in our life, until we unmask it to fully embody vulnerability as an act of strength, and not an act of weakness. That is the only way to throw the robber of perfection out of our inner-house.
You will find the article on
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/perfection-robber-harmeet-anand