Let Sail the Failboat

Voltaire wrote, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

Okay, actually he didn't.  He wrote, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien."  And from what I've been told, a more literal translation of that is, "The best is the enemy of the good."  Nevertheless, we're going with the above statement. :)


We're also going to take it in a slightly different direction than that in which he originally intended.  The original quote itself refers more to doing something like writing.  First you just have a few ideas.  If you scribble some ideas on a scrap of paper and fork that over as a completed project, it's not likely to be received well by your instructor or publisher.  At that point, the project needs more work.  So you write your outline, do any research you might need to, cobble together a rough draft, and polish it into a first draft.  Then you go to town revising and editing.  You really flesh it out where it's too lean; you tighten it up where you'd started to ramble, and you snazz it up so it leaps off the page.  The prose is clean and free of spelling and grammatical errors.  You're done, right?


Well, with any given project or task, some folks know when it's time to kick it out of the nest, and some don't.  Some know if they go through one more time, they'll find something else to fix.  And they will.  Every time.  Because we can always make things better.


But there comes a point where good is good.  You can keep pouring time, effort, heart, soul, and sanity into making good better, but you won't really make it noticeably better, and if you were investing those resources in another project, you could have a lot more impact.  And there's a chance that while you're poring over minute details and making changes based more on whim than actual improvement, deadlines are flying by and other people are growing increasingly frustrated.  Hence, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."  Time and effort lost seeking perfection once that state of being good has been obtained is all too often a waste and impedes more good.
  
So that's what the quote's supposed to mean.  But we're going to do a little wordplay and tweak the quote for our own purposes. :)


We each understand that our words and actions have effects, and we seek to choose our words and actions mindfully so as to create the best possible effects.  We seek to do the right thing and to be good people.  

But are we perfect? 


No.


And that is O-KAY.  We're people.  People are not perfect.  


What's important is that we put effort into being good, into doing the right thing, into choosing our words and actions mindfully.  That's what we should focus on.  Yeah, we're going to flub up sometimes.  And we could beat ourselves up about it, but that kind of attitude is the enemy of the good.  It's discouraging; it creates a negative attitude toward oneself.  How we feel about ourselves ends up reflected in how we treat others, and then our butterfly wings are flapping ripples of yuck into the world.  Blech.

We're works in constant progress.  We should hold ourselves to certain standards, to be sure; it wouldn't be at all helpful to say, "I can't be perfect so why try at all?"  But we shouldn't hold ourselves to impossible standards and then punish ourselves when we don't live up to them.  We shouldn't expect ourselves to be perfect. The standard of perfection is the enemy of good people.  

We also shouldn't expect other people to be perfect.  We should hold them to certain standards, as well, especially since people have a way of meeting your expectations of them.  But if we expect people to be perfect and tear them down when they're not, all we're doing is causing harm to them and to ourselves.


When we flub up--and we will--here's what we do: Take a step back.  Breathe.  Remind yourself that you did the best you could under the circumstances.  Remind yourself you're a good person.  Forgive yourself.  Repeat all the above steps while thinking of other people involved in the situation.*  Learn from what went wrong.  Move on.  Go back to focusing on being a good person, on doing the right thing, on choosing your words and actions mindfully.  Look ahead.  And smile.  Because life is good.  Even when we flub up.


In fact, flubbing up is a vital part of life.  It helps life be good because it's how we learn and grow.  I'm far from the first person to say it, but it bears repeating: it's what you do after you flub up that makes all the difference.  It's what we choose to do with our mistakes that matters. 


And learning from our mistakes not only helps us learn, grow, and become better people, it gives us knowledge and--hopefully :P--wisdom to help guide those who look to us.


When looked at that way, mistakes aren't sources of shame; they're gifts and blessings.


Embrace your gifts and blessings of all types and be gentle with yourself. :)

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." -Plato 

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* "But how can I really assume that?" you ask.  Well, maybe you can't.  Or maybe you know that's not the case.  But the field of social psychology, Lee Ross, Edward E. Jones, Victor Harris, and Keith Davis--and probably others--bring us knowledge of the fundamental attribution error/correspondence bias/attribution effect.  Put very simply, this is where we tend to draw conclusions about another person's character based on their actions in a given situation.  However, if we were in that situation, we would attribute our actions to environmental factors rather than character-based ones.  For instance, if a person was snappish, you might conclude they were a rude, inconsiderate person.  If you were the snappish person, however, you might know you're not rude by nature but just have a splitting headache.  You're inside your own head, know your own circumstances, and are sympathetic to your own cause.  That's not always the case when dealing with people outside oneself; it can be all too easy to judge.




There are two blog posts by other people which are generally related to this topic.  This one talks about the disease of perfection, which is something I'll talk about again, and I'll probably link this blog post again then as well.  And this one talks about the importance of falling and the even greater importance of getting back up.