Essay
Perfection — Worthy Goal or Fool’s Errand?
My name is Paul, and I’m a perfectionist.
I also have three brains. Seriously, it’s true! Let me explain.
Thanks to the ways in which the constructs of our Western society dictate that we define ourselves, I have a public “work identity” and a more closely guarded “personal identity.” Notwithstanding the many ways in which social media has encouraged us to distort and idealize both identities (more on that in a future essay on procrastination and perfectionism), while there is some crossover between the two, they are somewhat distinct modes of functioning and putting myself out in the world. Witness the differences between my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, for example. Both identities have one thing in common: they most likely portray a more perfect version of me than actually exists in the mortal realm, despite my lifelong attempts to pursue real-world perfection. If you can’t be perfect in real life, you might as well be perfect in digital reality, right? (Wrong. See referenced future essay above. When I get to it. Someday.)
This phenomenon has led me to visualize my gray matter as actually having three distinct modes of functioning, starting with my “personal identity brain.” It’s pretty much an amorphous collection of dreams, fears, household drudgery, treasured family life, dreaded family drama, spiritual struggle, and occasional indulgences in mildly delusional thinking. (You know you do it too — admit it!) Let’s set that quivering mass of slightly-past-expiration-date gelatin aside for the moment and call it Brain #1. This brain is sometimes cooperating, but more often in conflict with, Brains 2 and 3.
Moving on, we have Brain #2, the brain of mine that went to university — twice (or three times if you count that semester I spent at the University of Malaga in Spain as a 40-something). This is the perfectionist, academician-in-training-wannabe me, whose initial hopes of being a brilliant microbiologist were dashed between the rocks of abysmal biochemistry grades and the maelstrom of a family crisis in the form of a father who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease when I was 15.
That particular boat sinking for the moment, I left school to plumb the depths of a career in the employ of the US Navy to keep myself afloat. Three years of training as an apprentice non-destructive testing journeyman left me yet more burdened with a perfectionist bent. Disillusioned by what I saw as a gargantuan waste of taxpayer money, I returned to my academic pursuits three years later, this time to study English — because quite frankly, writing was one of my earliest and greatest loves — and education, because my practical side was thoroughly convinced I’d never make it as a writer. (My 58-year-old professional writer self now looks at 20-something me with mild disdain, evidentiary gesturing, and subtle head-shaking a la Khaby Lame. That’s @khaby.lame on TikTok for you fellow Boomers.)
Let’s fast forward past my discovery that I was not quite cut out to be a public school teacher to my job as a research editor working for an educational testing company in the 1990s. There, I exercised my perfectionism to the utmost, not only in fact-checking, but also doing my best to ensure that the company’s testing materials foisted upon public school students were so excellently written that no apathetic pupil could possibly accuse them of inaccuracy, illegibility, incomprehensibility, or cultural bias. (Never mind that at the time, I was wholly unaware of how much cultural bias existed in both Brain #1 and Brain #2, and that I was therefore a rather poor judge of what constituted said bias.)
Am I digressing? That’s Brain #1 attempting to override Brain #2.
Skipping to the present, life’s unexpected journeys have brought me to a lovely little late Victorian suburban home I share with my wife, dogs, cranky conure, and countless generations of house centipedes who graciously prefer to restrict themselves to the cellar for the most part. (Thanks, fellas!) Here, I work mostly from home (pre-COVID!) as a writer, audio and video post-production editor, website manager, and luthier.
{Screeching brakes} Wait what? Luthier you say? How does that square with the thinky/writey/techie stuff you do?
Well, that’s Brain #3: Musician/artist/craftsman me. The me whose pianist/artist/engineer father gave a guitar when I was six years old, taught to paint, and lectured endlessly on philosophy, science, and nature (when Brain #3 me was probably too young to understand). The father who left me with an incomplete childhood when Alzheimer’s robbed him of his lucidity, composure, artistry, and ultimately, his life. (Hypothesis for psychology nerds: Incomplete childhood leads to a pathological need to feel in control, which in turn generates perfectionism. Your thesis is due at the end of the semester. Times New Roman 12 pt, double- spaced but not two-sided, if you please.)
This is the brain that was born of Brain #1’s mildly delusional thinking.
Anyway — that first guitar, which I ultimately dismantled at the age of 7 to learn how it was put together, started a dual life-long journey into both music and lutherie.
But what does all this have to do with perfectionism and having three brains?
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says “an over-sharpened sword soon dulls.” I know this to be true in a literal sense from years of sharpening and repairing woodworking tools. But of course, it’s also a beautifully astute metaphor. I like to think of it as what I call the “Just a Little Further Is Probably Too Far” law. I say this with some irony, because to me, it implies that one never quite gets to a satisfactory end-point. It’s like a family in a car on an outing, with the kids chanting “Are we there yet?” while the parents robotically respond “Just a little further.” (Nod to The Simpsons for that image.) Ultimately, the road trip ends in disaster when the end of the road is not only reached, but left in the dust, to the dismay of all involved.
In short, I’ve concluded that the quest for perfection is a one-way journey into the Abyss. This is true for Brains 1, 2, and 3.
How does this play out in detrimental ways in my three brains?
Brain #1: Here’s a perfect example. My wife comes up with a solution to a domestic issue we are dealing with. It doesn’t matter what the issue is. More often than not, I promptly imply that her solution can’t possibly be right, because we have not yet taken into account and thoroughly analyzed all of the variables and probable outcomes yet, and therefore, we must discuss all the permutations and alternative scenarios. This of course leads to what we who once dwelled in cubicles used to call “analysis paralysis” — not to mention an understandably put-off spouse.
Brain #2: Writers have deadlines. Deadlines can be hard to meet if you are constantly churning the possibilities of a better turn of phrase, a better sentence structure, a better word choice, or whether using an em dash or a comma to set off a particular appositive phrase is more appropriate. The constant, endless salad-tossing of what is already quite good can often lead to over-sharpening your language, sacrificing sparks of wit upon a pyre of exactitude. Perfect language is all too often dull language. Marketers and ad writers have long been trained to understand and exploit this (although I will forever refuse accept that “pant” is a complete article of clothing as opposed to what dogs do when they’re hot). It’s taken perfectionist me a lifetime of dulling the blade to accept the truth of it.
Brain #3: I can’t tell you how many times my Just a Little Further law has played into the marring of an otherwise perfectly good piece of work in my guitar workshop. Let’s take the badly damaged soundboard (guitar top) I have hung on the wall over one of my workbenches. On it, I’ve pasted a little sign with another personal maxim: “Failure is the fire in which mastery is forged.”
I ruined this soundboard specifically because no matter how close I was getting to what I had determined to be the perfect thickness, I wanted to go just a little further — until I drove the car straight off the proverbial cliff. Let me state this emphatically right now: Excellence is not perfection, and perfection is not excellence. Confuse the two at thine own peril. This leads me to my third and probably most important personal maxim: “Mastery is not the pursuit of perfection, but the pursuit of excellence.”
My three brains will no doubt be shouting these three maxims to each other until the day when I drop dead over a keyboard, or a workbench, or a cutting board covered with carrots that I’ve been chopping far too slowly because all the pieces must be exactly the same length. Hopefully, my last gasp will be a chuckle at my own foolishness, rather than an exasperated sigh.
