To All Perfectionists

Let's face it. Most of us want to be excellent, and if we could, we would be excellent in everything we undertook. But...how realistic is this?

When I wrote my last blog entry, Author John Green and his Passion for Learning, a strange thing happened. Actually, if you know me, it is not so strange. This blog entry became the gold standard for all subsequent blog entries that I would write, and all the subsequent blog entries were to meet this gold standard of surpass it. This all happened on a subconscious level.

What is wrong with that? You may even be thinking that my John Green blog entry was my best blog entry, and I would be upping my game if I just kept posting blog entries like that one. (Some of you may even be thinking, hey, you would might gain a few subscribers.)

Personally, I liked my John Green blog entry the best. Unlike, my other blog entries, it took a lot of time, and some research.

My John Green blog is probably also the reason I have not written a blog entry in a while. While that blog entry is not perfect, it is the closest blog entry that I have to perfection. Subconsciously, I raised the bar for myself, and I raised it too high.

Perfection can paralyze us. It stopped me from blogging for over a week, which is in the big scheme of things is tiny. But what if the stakes were higher?  What if I was writing a book, and I decided that I could not write the next chapter because the previous chapter was the best? What if I were a famous Youtuber, like PewDiePie, and could not produce another Youtube video because it would not be as good as my previous one? (Is anyone impressed because I know who PewDiePie is?)

We all want to be excellent. I want each one of these blog entries to be excellent, but when I define excellence as almost perfect, reaching excellence on a regular basis is almost unattainable.

I have other things that I want to be excellent at, and some of them are of more importance to me. Since I am unable to obtain excellence in everything I do at all times in my life, it is best I strike a balance.

We want to be excellent, and we have been taught to always to our best, but we must consider at any given time how much we realistically can give to something that we want to do well, and what impact using that time and energy will have on other areas of our lives.

If you are like me, and you keep raising the bar for yourself, learn to recognize this pattern, and learn to recognize when your self-expectations are too high. Most importantly, never let your desire for perfection stop you from doing something.