The quest for perfection
Members of the Japanese Samurai culture pursued perfection in everything they did. They sought harmony with the world around them and dedicated the vast majority of their time to the focus and attention on even the most mundane detail of their lives. They set the standard that many strive to achieve even today and they are also the reason why I feel like a failure in most everything I do.
I have never been accused of being an overachiever. As a child I hid in imaginary worlds and would rather read books, draw pictures, or build make-believe worlds for my He-Man action figures. I struggled with math and science as a student because it was too much structure and logic for me to comprehend. This, in turn, was an open invitation for my mind to take a vacation during class and a predictable drop in my grades as a result. I barely squeaked trough each grading period during high school with at least one C, which also resulted in me being grounded for the next grading period. Throw in a couple unfortunate incarcerations and a therapist diagnosing me as mentally retarded with a learning disability and things looked pretty dismal.
I tried my best to counter that diagnosis and truly did set out to do good things and prove the therapist wrong, but again, my interest was not piqued enough to really put any more effort than was necessary to get me through to the next challenge. After half-assing my way through a substantial portion of my life I finally settled down with the perfect wife and started a family. Unfortunately I found that laziness and detachment don’t just magically go away as you assume the trappings of adulthood. You actually have to grow up and work for it. When I started working with leather I took on many projects that I borrowed (i.e, outright stole) from other people, and did my best to parlay my inspiration into an exact clone. Despite my enthusiasm I could never get it exactly right and, because of that, found myself just as frustrated as I did with everything else that didn’t come naturally. Is everything in my life destined to be a failure?
This was the crux of my problem. I strive for perfection, but do I even know what perfection looks like? I see people do things on tv and movies and I read about achievements in books and articles. Why is it so easy for everyone else and so difficult for me? I measure myself against others constantly, but when I look at my work I understand that this was MY effort…..not theirs. I made this. I used the materials and tools available to me along with the skills I possessed at the time and did my best effort. Who says my work has to look exactly like someone else’? In fact, I have gone to great lengths in my life to not do things just like everyone else and that is one of the things that I actually like about myself.
When I stop comparing my work to that of other artists and compare it only to the work I completed a month or a week or a day prior then I can see the improvements I have made. I see my style and aesthetic develop as I look back to the first piece and all the way forward to the most recent. I see chances I took, problems I solved and gambles that paid off. I see the thousands of hours at my workbench and the countless hours I lay awake at night thinking about the exact way I would make that piece come to life. I think about design aspects that I created through trial and error and how those designs have made people smile, laugh, and even cry.
When I look upon the entirety of my work I marvel at how far I have come in such a seemingly minimal amount of time and I am amazed. When I look upon the entirety of my life with the same lens I am equally amazed. By themselves the events of my life seem like disjointed failures but when I look at the whole canvas a different picture emerges. I see a lifetime of challenges and failures lead to dogged determination and a willingness to find a way to succeed in the face of that very failure. I see a plethora (Si, El Guapo) of skills and abilities synthesized together to make the life I am so happy with today. I have a wonderful family. I have a great job that challenges me and teaches me. I have my own business and an organization that does it’s very best to help others in need. I have friends and family that I love. I have already achieved perfection. I just needed a change of perspective.
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