Don’t strive to be perfect, strive to be better

In pursuit of the courage to be imperfect

One of the hardest adjustments I’ve had to make transitioning from college and starting my career was understanding that, in the real world, there are rarely right and wrong answers. Many things are relative, and you need a healthy amount of confusion tolerance to not go crazy.

In school, we’re taught that everything is either right or wrong. 2+2 = 4; the French Revolution occurred in 1789; the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell; don’t start sentences with a conjunction.

And the way our education system is set up rewards students who conform to what is considered right: exams test your ability to regurgitate information; the SAT regards aptitude as whether you can choose the right answer from a set of options.

While I certainly believe facts are facts, people often mischaracterize what they believe as what is truth. For example, for thousands of years, people thought it’d be impossible to fly. Then the Wright brothers came and challenged that notion. Now we’re able to hurtle in giant metal tubes for roughly 1–17 hours and be anywhere on the planet all while watching a stupid Kevin Hart movie 30,000 feet in the sky (the next invention is letting us have enough legroom).

However, my aim here is not to critique our education system (because I have no tangible solution and I’m sure there are smarter people out there more qualified to do that). Rather, I’d like to focus on that feeling of unease that comes when you leave a system judged by clear expectations into a world where the delineation between right and wrong is blurred and you don’t receive a report card every 3–4 months that tells you how you’re doing.

In my current role as a management consultant, our job is to help our clients make better business decisions. We do so by performing various qualitative and quantitative analyses. We analyze markets, competitors, customer needs, and company capabilities (damn I just frameworked this paragraph, I hate myself) all in effort to help our clients make the “right” decisions. But usually, there is no clear right decision — our clients have many options and we must examine and prioritize which moves will create the most impact. To put it bluntly, that shit is hard — synthesizing that many factors is not easy, and the picture is almost never clear.

Now take someone who’s been conditioned to search for perfectly clear and right decisions and then place them in an environment where answers are not just multiple choice, and the stakes are not just a GPA. While it may be liberating to have so many options, it more often than not causes decision paralysis — the phenomena that occurs when too many options are available which causes people to have a harder time making decisions. And in an industry where clients expect expert advice within as little as 4–6 weeks, any time lost to indecision is costly (if anyone from my company is reading this, please know that I am trying my best lol).

But beyond work, we all have our ideas of what a perfect life looks like — nice house, nice car, loving family and friends, traveling the world, Apple AirPods. And when those things don’t come immediately (especially for a generation accustomed to immediate gratification), we start to feel disappointed, or even, unmotivated. No wonder many recent graduates suffer from post-graduate depression.

The irony is that our desire to be perfect often hinders our ability to do anything.

We’re trapped in inaction because we’re afraid to make mistakes; we’ve become conditioned to avoid selecting the wrong answer when, in many instances, there is no clear right, and there is no clear wrong. We’re used to all or nothing — you either select the right answer on the exam or you don’t — so if you’re not living the perfect life, you’re not living at all.

We’re used to striving for perfection and answering all the exam questions correctly. But what happens when our clients — and more importantly, the world — is not asking that we be perfect, but that we make things better? Because, you see, being perfect is regressive — it asks that you meet a pre-established definition, to meet the highest standards of what is to be expected. But by that very definition of perfection, the most we can ever expect to achieve is what we are now.

Take, for example, the horse-drawn carriage. Karl Benz (sorry not Thomas Ford) could’ve decided to make the perfect horse-drawn carriage, but he realized that’s not what the people needed. The world needed a better, faster, more convenient method of transportation, so he made the first modern automobile. And now, we have Domino’s that use autonomous driving cars to deliver pizza.

In other instances, the very idea of “perfect” is subjective. How can we agree on the “perfect chocolate chip cookie” if we can’t even agree on the criteria that makes a great chocolate chip cookie? Some people like crunchy cookies; some like chewy; others still eat Chips-Ahoy (sorry, nothing against Chips-Ahoy, but there’s levels to this shit, and if you’re gonna buy store-bought cookies, at least buy the bakery ones; also this took a weird tangent, sorry).

Life is not a series of exams that you pass, and by reframing our ambition to be better rather than being perfect, we liberate ourselves from feelings of inadequacy for not meeting preconceived notions of perfection. And with that liberation comes a freedom to experiment, to try cool shit.

This mindset is especially relevant to creative and artistic pursuits. Though some may believe differently, there is no such thing as the perfect book, the perfect article, the perfect song, or the perfect chocolate chip cookie. But there are great books (c/o Shea Serrano) great articles (c/o Kris Gage), great songs, and great chocolate chip cookies. As someone who fancies himself an aspiring writer (I’m trying, Jennifer), this has been a mindset I’m working to adopt. I’ve started numerous articles over the past few months and have ruminated countless more, but only one ever made it out. I’ve become so absorbed in trying to write the perfect article that anytime my writing starts to feel imperfect, I’ve gotten discouraged and given up.

What I’ve failed to understand is that, by their very nature, creativity and art is meant to upend our preconceptions of what is right and perfect. And the difference between those great pieces of art and those that others dream up are that they’ve been brought to life. These creators had the courage — the audacity — to share their gifts with the world, imperfections and all. And we should too, with no pressure of being perfect, just earnestness in our effort to be better, to make better.

So for those graduating college or for those facing insecurity in their career or life, let’s start 2019 by daring to not be perfect. Let’s lean into the confusion with the understanding that perfect gets us nowhere, and the only way to push forward — whether it’s our art, our career, or our cookies — is to forge ahead despite the uncertainty we may face. The world and our taste buds demand it.