perfection is the enemy of happiness

Jun12
by TFS on June 12, 2019 at 10:20 am
Posted In: Philosophy, Psychology, Random Thoughts

A totally non-perfect scene from our recent holiday

 

They say that “perfection is the enemy of good” and I wholeheartedly believe in this mantra.

But it is usually applied to situations around either business/entrepreneurial endeavours e.g:

You can’t wait to ship your product until it’s perfect because that will never happen.

Or artistic and creative ones e.g:

You can’t expect every article or sentence you write to be perfect otherwise you will end up suffering from crippling writers block and never actually get around to finishing anything.

 

But I think this rule actually applies way more generally in life and can deeply affect someones outlook on life and therefore be a major blocker to their internal and long lasting happiness.

I’ll demonstrate this with the customary way of doing so on personal finance blogs, with a story about eggs.

 

how do you like your eggs in the morning… perfect?!

I was talking to a friend the other day about a mutual friend, let’s call her “P 1“, who she’d been on a short holiday with, and commented how P seemed to be somewhat down in the dumps lately. There was then the story about the eggs. P made some poached eggs for breakfast one morning but overcooked 2 them and was in a right old tizz about it. She was bordering on throwing them away! My friend told her not to be silly and ate the eggs, and told her they were lovely which I have no doubt they were anyway.

It may be only a small thing but I really think this lets us into the window of how a perfectionists mind works, and I can’t help but feel the two things are connected some how. That is the egg story and the down in the dump-ness.

I posit that having such high standards is one of admittedly many paths to living a miserable life:

  • Requiring perfection of yourself over everything means you are never going to be content with yourself, and probably end up with low self esteem and all that jazz.
  • Requiring perfection of others in your life means they are going to be constantly “letting you down” and cause unnecessary conflicts.
  • Requiring perfection in your general surroundings and day to day life means you are going to end up being a rather fussy git and never just “be”, and able to enjoy whatever situation you are in.

So you are on holiday 3 but the weather is crap (see picture above!) – so what? Make the best time of it and get on with it. You cannot control every little thing in your life, especially the weather! Therefore it would massively pay to change your mindset about those sort of things.

How can I sit here in my ivory tower throwing down such blasé comments to all the high and mighty yet still somehow miserable perfectionists out there?

Because… here comes the twist…. I totally used to be one!!! Of course I bloody did!

 

I remember all of my creative/extracurricular endeavours in my 20’s whether that be with music, writing or even DIY, would either never get anywhere or if they did I would never be satisfied with the final result.

I mean this very seriously: I remember when we painted our first flat I was constantly wound up about patches I wasn’t particularly happy with even years later, even bits that no one would ever see or if they did would never even notice. It would end up being such an outsized source of anguish compared to how much it should have actually mattered to me.

If I could time travel back and give myself any advice it would probably just be:

“Chill out man! No one gives a f*ck about this sort of stuff and neither should you!”

Even looking back at my blog writing drafts folder there are over 50 in there, either unformed ideas I deemed not good enough and even a fair few whole blown articles I’ve never gotten around to “perfecting” – so I’m definitely still not out of the woods with this stuff, but I’ve definitely made a big move in the right direction.

Maybe it’s just a youthful thing and everyone becomes more chilled out as they get older, I don’t know for sure. But I definitely think once you are aware of this sort of thing, and the potential unhappiness it could be bringing you, you can start to cultivate a different mindset.

As usual just knowing it’s a thing, tends to help.

So hopefully I’ve helped some of you out with this undoubtedly imperfect little article.

 

80/20 happiness

Just a final bit that I wanted to say but didn’t really fit with the rest of the piece (see, how cavalier/imperfect could this get!?)

This imperfection mindset ties in really nicely with the classic Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule.

For example if I can get:

  • 80% of the benefits of FI with only 20% of the work, I will take that!
  • 80% benefits of happiness with only 20% of the material sh*t people think they need to live a happy life, I will take that!
  • 80% profits from a side hustle or new business venture with only 20% of the effort, I will not be gunning for that extra 20% of profits and the final and huge 80% of the work!

At the risk of repeating myself, I will be happy with my 80% of results/benefits of any given situation, and not go for the perfect and let’s be honest unattainable 100% which would require a monumental amount of time and effort to get anywhere near.

Happy 80/20’ing peeps! 🙂

 

p.s. Final final bit… I wrote this post in about 45 minutes and only proof read it once. Definitely walking the walk… 🙂

Notes:

  1. For Perfect, geddit? ↩
  2. Or was it undercooked? I can’t really remember and probably should not have wasted any of your time digressing this much about it. Apologies 🙂 ↩
  3. Oh sorry… did I not mention that we’ve recently spent 2 weeks in the South of France? 🙂 🙂 🙂 ↩