I recently dragged my kids to Baltimore so that I could have lunch with an old colleague (he’s young…but we’ve known each other for 13 years) at the National Catholic Education Association convention. A gifted writer and speaker, my friend can get his audience to …
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Therese, looking for the perfect comment to your post I stumbled across this:
“Congratulations! You’re not perfect! It’s ridiculous to want to be perfect anyway. But then, everybody’s ridiculous sometimes, except perfect people. You know what perfect is? Perfect is not eating or drinking or talking or moving a muscle or making even the teensiest mistake. Perfect is never doing anything wrong – which means never doing anything at all. Perfect is boring! So you’re not perfect! Wonderful! Have fun! Eat things that give you bad breath! Trip over your own shoelaces! Laugh! Let somebody else laugh at you! Perfect people never do any of those things. All they do is sit around and sip weak tea and think about how perfect they are. But they’re really not one-hundred-percent perfect anyway. You should see them when they get the hiccups! Phooey! Who needs ‘em? You can drink pickle juice and imitate gorillas and do silly dances and sing stupid songs and wear funny hats and be as imperfect as you please and still be a good person. Good people are hard to find nowadays. And they’re a lot more fun than perfect people any day of the week.”
~Stephen Manes, Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days!
I love this article. I work for a micromanaging legal type. She spends sooo very much time making sure that everything is perfect that she actually wastes time that could have been spent doing something else and just accepting a few problems. Working for a person like this can be the most degrading sort of work environment there is because at least in this case…whenever there is the slightest error there’s a witch hunt to find the one responsible for it and punish them. Even when the error is made by the perfectionist there seems to be a need to find some way to make it someone else’s error. I can’t imagine that anyone like this is happy, in this case I’ve heard she acts like this at work because her spouse won’t put up with it at home. It’s fine to strive for perfection but when you get to the point that it dominates your life it’s gone too far.