Seeking Perfection Isn’t A Problem, Being Crushed When You Fail Is

As a parent, it’s natural to wish to be the best possible role model for your child.

In an email from my brother, I came across a line that I suspect came straight from his therapist.

“Dad made us think we had to be perfect, but it’s okay not to be perfect.”

All therapists must use the same game plan because I’ve seen this line pop up in a number of places.

Most recently, I wrote an article about ghosting and I mentioned that I felt a need to strive for perfection as a parent. Predictably, somebody chirped in the comments telling me, “You don’t have to be perfect, that’s your father talking.”

Taken within the context of the therapist’s playbook, I can see why the use of the word “perfect” could be triggering. I get what the comment was getting at, but in this case, I think the psychoanalysis based on a 1,000-word essay was misapplied.

It’s true that you don’t have to be perfect, and that’s a good thing because you can’t be perfect. Manipulative people can always point at your mistakes rather than your successes in order to crush your spirit.

But knowing this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aspire to be the best that you can be. Perfection is a lodestone. When you set your heading in the direction of perfection you’ll find a lot of great things come to you.

Everybody’s a critic

One of the most important lessons you have to learn in life is that it’s a lot easier to criticize than it is to attempt to achieve anything productive.

We’re about to enter another season of political campaign ads, so unfair criticism is about to be on full display.

“My opponent’s policies are a disaster!”

It’s always somebody else’s fault. It’s always somebody else’s mistake.

Unfortunately, politicians who stand up like adults and hold themselves accountable rarely win elections.

I remember an advertisement featuring Michael Jordan where he read off the statistics about the number of times he had an opportunity to make the winning basket only to miss.

Michael Jordan!

You can always, always, always, point to an example of how somebody didn’t do enough. It doesn’t matter who that person is, it doesn’t matter how much they achieved. There is always, always something they failed to do.

“Nice Super Bowl victory Mr. Brady, but I see you threw 8 incomplete passes. Why is that number so high?”

Manipulative people put failure under a lens and magnify it so that it outshines every achievement. One of the fundamental characteristics of manipulative people is that they start to bristle when you try to put their failures under a lens.

All of a sudden, they seem to recognize that any hyper-focus on failure is unfair. It’s funny how that works.

Grades

Much has been written on how the whole concept of academic grades set students up for failure. However, it’s rare that anyone talks about the effect grades have on a child/parent relationship.

Many kids dread the day they bring home their report cards because they know it’s yet another opportunity for a parent to tell them how they aren’t good enough.

“There it is in black and white, everything I’ve always suspected about you. See? Right there! You’re a failure!”

Tell me, what good does it do kids to be subjected to this? How does that help set them on the path to becoming a productive member of society?

You have to learn to achieve for yourself

I always got yelled at even when I brought home good grades. The only thing that your parent teaches you in that situation is that you might as well fail since you are going to get screamed at anyway.

Why waste your time making the effort?

Why spend hours studying for a test when you could be out playing instead?

The thing that saved me was that somewhere along the line, I became more concerned with how I felt about my grades than whatever dumb impression my dad had.

After all, I knew which teachers were jerks. I knew that they knew they could make my dad scream at me by giving me a lower score. They’d met him at parent/teacher conferences! When you’re a kid, you learn how to endure getting chewed out because you don’t have any other choice.

Despite all this, I took pride in my grades. I did seek perfection, but I knew that sometimes when I didn’t achieve it, the failure wasn’t my fault. Sometimes my teacher failed and didn’t provide me with an opportunity to succeed. I became numb to my dad’s ignorant criticisms. I paid attention to my own dissatisfaction with my effort when that was appropriate.

I came to recognize there were times I succeeded, and I still got a poor grade because my teacher didn’t want to recognize my success.

Eventually, I came to realize that was also the case with my dad. He wouldn’t even recognize when I succeeded. That was impossible. Somehow, he perceived any success on my part as a threat to him.

Pressure

I put myself under too much pressure throughout college. I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol the whole time I was there. I had come to work.

I wasn’t perfect, but you don’t have to be perfect. People took notice.

It was later in life that I learned that you can give yourself a break every now and then. You can have a couple of beers on the weekends. You can do whatever you need to do to wind down. All that is okay. It can even lead to better results.

At the same time, I don’t regret going for it because I did it for myself. When I’ve achieved in life athletically or academically, I’ve celebrated the achievement. There is always going to be the white noise of criticism. I’ve learned to drown that out. When I give a good effort, even if the result isn’t what I wanted, I give myself credit for the effort.

It’s rewarding to be able to truly say, “I did my best.”

It is important to understand that you don’t have to be perfect, but that’s only half of the equation. The other half is that you still have to dig deep and give everything you can.

It’s okay to go through a bad patch. I’ve had periods of depression where I couldn’t scrape together any motivation. Sometimes the only way out of something like that is to go through it. I don’t understand it. Sometimes the pain just goes away. Sometimes it’s instant, sometimes it takes months. Eventually, you find more satisfaction in pursuing your dreams than you do in surrender.

These are lessons that can’t be taught.

It’s okay to strive for perfection

As a parent, I strive to be perfect even though I know I can never be. Part of that process is recognizing when you make mistakes. I’ll talk with my children about the mistakes I’ve made as a dad. I think that’s important. It’s important that you know you make mistakes, that you’re not infallible.

It’s important that people within your power know that too.

I used the same tactic when I was teaching. Some teachers like to wield absolute authority. I think that’s a mistake. Perhaps the most important lesson anyone in a position of authority can share is to stand up and admit it when they’ve failed. I’ve done this with my children and I’ve done it in classrooms. It’s never easy. That’s why I make myself do it.

When you are willing to admit your imperfections, relationships change in a way that’s truly beautiful. You’ve dulled that edge of pressure everyone feels. It’s particularly apparent in a classroom of kids. Who knows what terrible things those kids have to endure during the other 23 hours of every day? When you see kids walk into your classroom and decompress like they know they can take their armor off for an hour, that’s when you know you’ve succeeded.

And they achieve…

But they achieve not because they’ve given up on perfection, they achieve because they know failure is acceptable.

Find a balance

I think it’s natural for a parent to strive for perfection. It’s also true that you don’t have to be perfect. But saying you don’t have to be perfect is incomplete.

There’s joy to be found in doing your best. Perhaps the answer is to learn to focus on your effort rather than your results.

Your effort is the thing that you can control. You can’t control what grade a teacher gives you. You can’t control prejudice. You can’t control chance.

But you can control the fact that you will do the best you can every day. Set goals. Set high standards. Congratulate yourself if you live up to them.

The only time failure becomes a problem is when it derails you from following a sound strategy.

When people say, “You don’t have to be perfect,” you can’t take it as an excuse not to give your best effort. That is just as much a form of manipulation as a hyper-focus on failure.