What 50 Pounds of Clay Can Teach Us About Perfection
Perfection does not exist
An art instructor once conducted an experiment with his 50 students.
He splits them into two groups of 25. Both groups each gets 50 pounds of clay.
Group 1 = The goal is to create as many pots as you can. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
Group 2 = The goal is to create the perfect pot.
The instructor informed the students. “You each have one month to do it and then we’ll find a winner.”
When judgment day arrived, an intriguing fact emerged.
Group 2 was not able to accomplish it.
The group that made the closest to a ‘perfect pot’ was Group 1, who wasn’t even striving for perfection. They were just focused on making as many as they could and because of that approach, they got better.
MORAL OF THE STORY
A lot of us fail to progress in certain areas in our lives because we’re crippled by perfection. Perfection is rooted in fear.
Fear of judgment. We think that ‘failure’ is the ultimate shame.
If this sounds like you, then I’m here to tell you you’ve been misled, my friend. Let me explain.
Think about your favorite role model. I’m sure your admiration grew for them because you were captivated by at least one of their ‘end result’ aka their success. And if you look into their journey, I’m sure you will find that they have failed many times.
ALL WINNERS LOSE — — LIKE A LOT. There is no debate.
What separates the winners from the rest is how they define failure. As I mentioned earlier, most of us define failure as the “ultimate shame.” For the ones that were able to achieve desired results, they define failure as “lessons.”
One of my favorite quotes is from the man that gave us the light bulb, Thomas Edison.
When a reporter asked him “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?”
He replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that won’t work.”
I do understand everyone has different ways of defining perfection, but the one I’m talking about is the toxic kind that holds people back from progressing. The one where people overly obsess about their missteps and hope that things will change — — which can be accurately be described by Albert Einstein’s famous quote: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
Your first 25 videos are going to suck — — and that’s okay. But by the 100th video, you’re gonna look back at your 10th video and smile with joy seeing how far you came and glad you stuck it through.
Embrace the process and detach yourself from the end result. If it doesn’t work out, you just gained a lesson for what not to do. 😄
