Struggling to achieve perfection? This nautical metaphor might help

There’s a certain kind of person who dives into each new life-improvement project – decluttering, redecorating, a new fitness regime – determined not to do things by halves. I’m one of them. When I discovered the new(ish) and impressive productivity software Notion the other week, my first instinct was to transfer my entire digital life to it; and when I set up a home composting system last month, I had to fight the urge to spend a fortune on the very best equipment for what is, after all, basically a heap of old food in the corner of the yard.

It’s easy to rationalise this attitude as a desire to do things properly, but really it’s the desire to do them perfectly – with the result that you either never get round to them, or you do, but then feel bad, because you’re constantly falling short of your unmeetable standards.

Lately, I keep seeing people slip into a similar all-or-nothing approach to social causes, too. Perhaps lockdown made them appreciate the importance of community, so they vow never again to let work duties distract them from being a good neighbour. Or police violence impels them to take to Twitter, declare their anti-racist credentials and swear they’ll henceforth be laser-focused on racial justice. The sentiments are admirable but, once again, perfectionism is at play: it’s hard to sustain the motivation to make a real difference when your standard for success is the total transformation of how you spend your energy and time.

To adapt an analogy from the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath, we’re like sailors on a ship that long ago left port and now urgently needs repair. We’d love to return to dock and get it kitted out perfectly – setting up our lives so they’re just as we’d like them – then start the journey again. Instead we have to patch things up mid-voyage as best we can, adapting incrementally towards the people we’d like to be. I have too much work to spend the next month designing the ideal productivity system. And you, I assume, have too many non-negotiable responsibilities to become the perfect, fully committed campaigner against injustice.

One useful perspective shift here is to reframe the situation so that learning to tolerate the discomfort of doing things imperfectly becomes a kind of self-improvement project in itself. From this viewpoint, a defining quality of the successful activist (or exerciser, declutterer, or anything else) is precisely that she cultivates the ability to resist demanding perfection of herself – to relish every small accomplishment as vastly preferable to the only real alternative, which is doing nothing at all.

Actually, Neurath’s ship analogy is helpful for thinking about the whole vast question of how to make our troubled world a better place. As the philosopher Christopher Lebron puts it in his book on race in America, The Color Of Our Shame: “The ship launched successfully but is not adequate. We have some materials on hand and we have learned a few things about how a ship works… We cannot abandon it, for we will all drown. [So] we improve it along the way, in fits and starts, with success and sometimes clumsily. I want to say, this is much the way a democracy works.”

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Brené Brown explores imperfection as a path to a wholehearted life, rather than an obstacle to one, in her 2010 book The Gifts Of Imperfection.