There’s No Such Thing as a Happy Perfectionist!

If you search on Google for “the secret to happiness” you’ll get about a b’zillion hits. Everyone thinks there’s some secret and if they could just find it everything would be sunshine and butterflies. Ha!

I am a happy person. No, my day isn’t filled with buttercups and song. Well, not the whole day. Psychologists believe that some people have a higher predisposition to happy than others. I may be one of those. Or it may be the many things I discarded along the way that have improved my level of happiness.

First on the chopping block was perfectionism. Hey, we all want things to be just so. When I was a child I would yell and scream at myself because I couldn’t make whatever I was creating perfect. I remember hitting myself in the head with little fists. I remember it. When I spotted similar tendencies in my children, we talked about it. I came up with this mantra: Perfection is the enemy of good. I impressed upon my kids, as I had to impress upon myself as a child, that if I was measuring myself against ‘perfect’ I would always come up short and end up ruining whatever pleasure I was deriving from an activity. I told my kids that the point was to enjoy doing the thing, not be vested in the perfectness — or imperfectness — of what resulted.

Making a card for a friend? Enjoy the drawing, the colouring, the feeling of the crayons or marker on the paper, the smells, the affection you were putting into the creation.

Completing an assignment at school? Focus on what you were learning and how you could use that in other ways. Work to make your project as delightful for your teacher as possible. She would be getting a lot of these, so how would you make her smile?

Cooking a meal? Think about the smells and tastes being combined, the visual richness of the dish. And if you put in too much salt or not enough sugar, remedy the problem creatively. The point wasn’t for the meal to be perfect, the point was to enjoy making, and then sharing, the meal.

These weren’t easy lessons to teach. The children had to be reminded over and over. And they weren’t easy lessons for me to learn when I was eschewing my tendency to criticize myself for every small slip. The Negative in my brain was oh so willing to latch on to every little thing it could to belittle me. But I pushed away The Negative and chose to focus on the good.

I have a girlfriend who is a marvelous writer. She’s so good she’s won awards. She weighs each word carefully. She wants them to be perfect. Unfortunately, each time she reads what she’s written there’s something that could be made better. That constant tweaking, that unwillingness to let her pieces be finished, get in the way of her productivity. Without a delivery deadline, she would be completely lost in a single story for all of her life. Thank heavens for deadlines.

I am a good writer, but I do not strive for perfection in every piece I create. Instead I focus on delivering my message. Some days I write words that make me cringe. I leave them. I’ll get them on the edit pass I do just before I deliver or post the blog. Other days my words are like silken chocolate and I smile, enjoying them as they roll around and melt in my brain. I’ve learned that good enough is my happy place and that if I let perfection become the goal I doom myself to dissatisfaction.

Sure, wanting to be perfect pops up all the time. Living in a world where perfection is captured fleetingly but paraded constantly — think of all that decor porn that comes at you making you feel like your lovely home could use some sprucing — makes us more vulnerable to the vagaries of perfectionism. But if your real life clashes so jarringly with your desire for perfect that it ruins your happiness, what’s the point of that?