Perfection

I'd like to hear your opinion on perfection, what is perfection?
Personally i believe perfection can always be strived towards but never attained. What do you think?

In the Stephen Kaufman translation of "The Book of Five Rings" by Miyomoto Musashi there is a great quote on perfection. I don't have my copy in front of me so forgive my paraphrasing here.

Perfection cannot be attained. That is what makes it worth striving for, if it were easy to get there would be no point.

Now some might argue that knowing that you can never succeed is just as detrimental, but I like what Musashi is saying here, especially as it applies to martial arts, which was Kaufman's goal. To me it says that we should always aim for perfection, but we should also not let ourselves get upset because we didn't reach it. It also reminds me that there is always more to learn and get better at.

A dream?

I'm not sure tbh on what perfection is... But I believe many people can, with ease, tell one another what is NOT perfect. I'm just going to ramble a little bit and ask a couple questions...

If one thing was perfect- could there exist simultaneously something imperfect? And what if everything was already perfect, including and accepting the illusion that we tell ourselves- that 'This Isn't Perfect/Right/Good!' Would we even know perfection if we saw it?

I personally believe perfection is a concept, and subject to subjective view of each individual. As we are using words, our notion of such a thing falls far short of the reality. But it's fun to imagine anyway right?

I agree that, if perfection of the self were to exist, it could only be strived for, but never attained as you said in your post. I believe that the journey is generally more important than the end goal and so if applied here, working positively towards anything is a stride, perhaps not towards perfection, but towards a meaningful life...

Thanks for the question, and hope my response made some sense,

Have a nice day Exar (Is that name from a Star Wars book/comic (set long before the films?)

why strive for perfection? isnt accomplishing a task fully... perfection? isnt accomplishment the same?
i am a believer that the word perfection is a label. The actual definition in the word is to accomplish fully with out flaw. so why do we need that label? just wondering?

Exar Qel Droma wrote: I'd like to hear your opinion on perfection, what is perfection?
Personally i believe perfection can always be strived towards but never attained. What do you think?

Agreed. A perfect answer.

I don't want to go into to much detail here so ill keep my view nice and simple.

There is no perfection, Perfection is stagnation and stagnation is death. To be perfect is to have no meaning, no purpose and nothing to live for. Perfection is death.

There's a great documentary on Netflix called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Not only is it an awesome food movie, it's a movie about perfectionism and what that means. There is a great quote from the sushi master Jiro:

"I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I'll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is."

I think that's what perfection is: whatever makes you keep trying and improving and striving. That no one knows where the top or the end is, if there even is one, does not matter in the slightest.

Much love,
Kai-An

My mom is a perfectionist. When things didn't go exactly the way she imagined them, she would explode. She'd be upset, angry and devastated for hours or days.

Guess what I learned to do? The SAME THING!

As an artist and in life, I've come to find that perfection isn't always what you intended it to be. We don't live in a bubble. Things don't always work out the way you think they will. Something will change. Something won't work out as I imagined it would. For me, the pitfall of being perfect makes me blind to the greatness that could be if I could simply adjust my views.

To use an example from this weekend: I set out to make a tooled leather wallet. I had this great design in my head on how it would work out. I've been doing leathercrafting for about a year now with some good success. Well, as the saying goes: "The best laid plans of mice and men / Often go awry". I accidentally (after taking care not to) marked what was going to be a light tan colored leather with black dye smudges, imprinted the design on the wrong side, managed to get ink stains from something else on it, used the template upside down (because I traced it backwards) so I got pencil marks on the leather, then got printer ink on the leather trying to prevent the pencil marks...then the dye had to be darker because of the black so I went with red...then it didn't stain evenly so I had to do it again (so it was darker than I wanted)...then the highlight didn't take evenly (and made it even darker).... I'm just glad this was a project for me and not for a client!

Had I tried this a few years ago, I would have given up and spent the day pissed off that I ruined a $30 (in material) project because it wasn't perfect. I wouldn't have the heart to throw it away and every time I saw the thing, I'd get mad again. But instead of trying for perfection, I decided to roll with the punches. It's not what I set out to accomplish, but it did turn out nicely (if not my perfect image). In the past, I've put in over 20 hours on a single project to drop it when I found a stitch or two out of place. Would it have affected the overall piece? No, but I couldn't get past that little mistake.

I'm sure this is something every artist hears "Oh it's perfect!". I can point out all sorts of flaws in my works. Or how something was unintentional. I work for perfection when I craft, but I accept that I am by far not a master craftsman. Another pitfall of striving to be perfect is not being satisfied with what you are or are working towards.

Trying to be perfect has caused me so much distress and anxiety in life. It's something I'm still working on, still have issues with. Yeah, one should always strive to be the best they can be. To produce work that is perfect and without flaw. But we should also be flexible and forgiving of ourselves when we don't get there. Every flaw is a chance to learn.

I actually looked up the dictionary definition and found something interesting:

per·fec·tion
/pərˈfekSH(ə)n/
noun: perfection

the condition, state, or quality of being free or as free as possible from all flaws or defects.
"the satiny perfection of her skin"

Perfection is whatever you choose it to be.

"Oh this coffee is at the PERFECT temperature!"


Sometimes we decide that perfection is something that we can reach, and when we do its "Just fine for what I need".

But sometimes we throw our hook and line of perfection way beyond where the fish of "what's-reasonable" gather, thinking we will eventually catch a fish.... but discover we wont... and lose our patience after trying again and again and again, or waiting longer and longer and longer...

Sometimes we pull our line in a bit, after realizing "well, I suppose I don't really need things to be THIS exact", and as we do, finally get some pull on the line... and sometimes make a pretty decent catch regardless of if we expected to.

I'm still working at pulling my line in, when working on projects. I keep wishing the fish would swim out where I keep throwing my line... But I lose my patience... sometimes, I'll get so frustrated, I'll just take my line out of the water completely and come back another day. Almost every time, I come back and re-evaluate "okay... the fish weren't out there last time... don't shoot it out there so far this time."... so I finally find the sweet spot, which is not so far out there... I catch a fish... and almost every time, its a gorgeous, giant bass of a catch!!

Lesson learned...

But only for that pond...

The next pond I approach... I'll likely do it again... And learn where the sweet spot is all over again.

Proteus wrote: Perfection is whatever you choose it to be.

It's also highly temporal and contextual. I mean, what's perfect right now is different from what's perfect in ten minutes. A friend of mine was fond of sending me photographs of impossibly gorgeous women in impossibly gorgeous Victorian dresses for the sole reason that she found it humorous of me to say each and every one of them was "perfect." She couldn't grasp that they each were, in their own instant.

Perfection, to me, is also about imperfection. To me, nothing "flawless" is perfect. It can't be. There are some things that are too pretty, or too good, or too wonderful, and I'm suspicious of these, because I see flaws as necessary to wholeness. (it should be noted that this addiction to flaws as a part of perfection is noticeably absent in my artistic work, where i will work myself nearly to death--occasionally literally--to make sure everything is as i see it, and am still disappointed with my best efforts.)