Image: silhouettes 2 courtesy of migueltexeira
As you would have seen from my Manifesto, I aim for excellence. Yet the more I strive to live by this principle, the more I realise that to achieve excellence I need to constantly make trade offs. Yes, I am finding that achieving excellence requires me to live my life using Pareto’s principle: that is, I am constantly having to identify (in every one and all areas of my life) the 20% of effort that delivers 80% of results, and try to spend most of my time in these twenty-percents.
Why? The reason is simple: There isn’t enough time in my days to achieve perfection in all the areas of my life I care to perform in. There are many areas of my life that I care about: family, work, health, personal growth, social connection, fun; and I have found that unless I choose only 1 or 2 of these, I can’t spend enough time to achieve perfection. Obviously, focusing on only a couple would lead to an unbalanced life, which would go against another of my values.
An so I must find the right trade-offs, which means I must accept imperfection.
How about you? Do you lose balance by striving for perfection? Or have you found a way to simplify your life enough and achieve balanced perfection in all of yoru priorities? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Actually, I think perfection is something we cannot reach as human beings, in the stage we are now. It is something that most people strive for, beginning in Elementary School and up to the very end of their lives. Teachers, managers, parents always insist on our need to achieve perfection, and my opinion is that this is the reason why there is so much unhappiness and frustration nowadays.
I believe that we should all aim at getting better and better every day, in each and every one of our performances. This will surely make us more profficient, more mature and more satisfied with ourselves as time passes. If every day we improve at least a little bit in everything we do, we will feel we are getting nearer perfection every day, but at the same time we won´t feel frustrated when we realize we haven´t reached “perfection”, which is what happens most of the time ( or maybe always!). So why not aim for permanent improvement instead of perfection?
This is only my opinion, what do you think?
Imperfection is a part of perfection. To me something entirely perfect misses some imperfection — somehow I see imperfection as the spice of perfection.
The truth is I cannot neglect any of the roles I have, and even if I could I wouldn’t, I enjoy each of them very much and each of them have a special meaning in my life, without any one of them my life would not be complete. So my only choice is to try to excel in each and every one of my multiple roles.
I try to achieve excellence by being where I am 100% and trying the best I can to focus on the present moments. For example, when I am with my kids I dedicate 100% of my attention to them; I don’t let anything distract me in any way. When I am at work I concentrate 100% in what I am doing and forget about everything else, and when with friends I try to give them my best when we are together. I try not to look at the clock and think about time the least I can (sometimes that can make me run a little bit late ? Ooops… imperfection). Another thing I do is that I don’t let my mobile distract me at all, I turn it off as often as I can… at the end of each “roll” or between rolls, I listen or read my messages. Anyways that’s a little bit of my formula to try to achieve the successful professional, beautiful in-shape woman, neat housekeeper, sexy selfless wife and great mom rolls altogether!!!
To summarize I try to play a little bit the “chameleon”, jumping from one roll to the other focusing 100% on each roll helps me find my balance. Although I must recognize that sometimes it can be extremely difficult, when I run into imperfection I say to myself: come on! That’s the spice!!!