Most of us grow up in systems that teach us to obsess about perfection. The perfect score, the perfect performance, and so on.
The quest for perfection matters in our professional lives. But a big part of our ability to transition from average performers to elite performers is realizing it is about the quest vs. the attainment.
In our personal lives, however, I’m convinced that this quest is counter-productive. Too many experiences are ruined by attempts at perfection.
A great example is weddings. They’re often associated with process, months of exhausting planning, and stress. A colleague once said – “I’d love to go back to do my honeymoon again. But I’d never want to go back to plan that wedding.” They’re not alone.
We did the opposite with our wedding. We talked about having one objective – our pictures must have photos of people smiling. While a tall order in a culture where weddings are an exercise in hours of process, that simple objective changed everything. We had 90% of the people we cared about at that time – all together. And we focused on maximizing the fun at every step with lots of thoughtful and fun-filled touches.
This undoubtedly came with lots of trade-offs. A lot of our planning was DIY – we had friends play event planners and photographers. I ended up cobbling together the wedding video myself. That also meant there were portions that didn’t work as we expected, events that surprised us (thanks friends), and many moments of magic.
But the end result was what we hoped – photos of people smiling and memories full of laughter. So much so that I sometimes wish I could transport close friends we made since go back in time to join us at our wedding.
Our wedding, in many ways, was the anti-thesis of perfect. But things don’t have to be perfect to be wonderful.
Learning to let go of perfect in our personal lives is both counter-intuitive and incredibly powerful. It changes how we operate.
Perhaps, more than anything, it helps us focus on creating experiences that have a high probability (note: again, it is about the quest vs. the attainment) of turning into memories. There’s no guarantee that it’ll happen. But, with the right ingredients and with thoughtful touches, they’ll happen more often than not.
Shooting for perfect, however, is a fool’s errand. Perfection be damned.
Things don’t have to be perfect to be wonderful.
