01 Mar There are good reasons for believing that embracing your imperfections will help you be happier and more successful
Many people mistakenly believe that happiness are success look like perfection.
When you’re happy, they believe, everything must be going perfectly; to be successful, they think, you must get everything right.
But happiness and success are NOT like that. In fact, happiness and success are much MESSIER than most people realise.
Which is why it can be very helpful to embrace faults and failings, imperfections and more…
via the Ladders by Mayo Oshin
It’s easy to get carried away with the never-ending search for the perfect plan to achieve our goals.
Whether we’re looking for the best diet plan to lose weight, the perfect idea for a book, or project, the best business strategies and so on, the pursuit of perfection can be exhilarating and addictive.
But does this focus on perfection lead to progress towards our goals? Or does it hold us back from achieving them?
Let’s get started.
The power of imperfection
“The perfect is the enemy of the good”—Voltaire
In the book, Art & Fear (audiobook), authors David Bayles and Ted Orland, describe the story of a ceramics teacher and the experiment with his students, which reveals surprising insights into why some people achieve their goals, and others don’t.
Here’s how the story goes (the original photography class story): 1
On the first day of the term, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, stood in front of his film photography students, and announced that the class would be divided in two.
On the left side of the studio, the first “quantity” group of students would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced. The greater the number of photos submitted by the student, the higher their grade.
On the right side of the studio, the second “quality” group of students would be graded solely on the quality of work produced. Unlike the “quantity” group, these students were only required to submit one nearly perfect image, to get an “A.”
At the end of the term, Uelsmann graded the students in both the “quantity” and “quality” group. The results were astonishing.
The best photos were all produced by the first group being graded for quantity.
As Uelsmann looked into the reasons for these unusual findings, the facts emerged: whilst the “quantity” group of students were busy taking photos, learning from their mistakes and improving the quality of their photos, the “quality” group sat around pondering on how to create the perfect picture, procrastinated on taking action, and in the end, produced mediocre photos.
This story highlights the difference in goal achievement, depending on whether we focus on quantity or quality.
As we’ve just seen, it’s the focus on producing a large quantity of imperfect work, that ironically increases the quality of results, and ultimately improves the odds of success with our goals…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE