For years I kept trying to tell myself that I didn’t get the whole perfection thing. That for me perfection was a concept that didn’t make sense. Perfection, even in the smallest of things is impossible, I would say to myself, as there are always improvements that can be made, no matter how small. I even tried to convince myself mathematically, an interesting decision given my lack of mathematical knowledge or understanding, but I latched on to the old Mandelbrot stuff about coastlines. You know the one, however hard you try to measure a coastline you can never measure it exactly because the coastline is fractal in nature, meaning that as you look closer and closer at a coastline you see that the lines you thought were straight and easy to measure are in fact made up of ever smaller lines each of which have to be measured, and each of these is made up of lines and so on and so on ad infinitum.
I am finally coming to the acceptance that this may not be the case for me. That there is at least the possibility that for some things, small things, things like writing a short article, cooking a simple meal, enjoying a film, can reach a state of perfection. Not perhaps in the sense that they are impossible to improve, but that they are perfect enough. Ok so this may be starting to sound like a cop out, but let me try to explain. There is a principle in economics called the law of diminishing returns which states that there is a point in a system at which the value of the amount of effort to make an improvement exceeds the value of the improvement. To give an example, lets say that you manufacture cardboard boxes. You start out making ten boxes a week by hand, and you sell them all so you decide to invest in another staff member, and they produce ten boxes too, so now you and your employee are both producing ten boxes, twenty in total and you sell all of those. Great! You think, and indeed it is, so you take on another staff member who makes ten boxes, and another and another, and then you reach a point where the last worker you employed only makes five boxes, so you think, that’s a bit odd.
When you investigate the situation you find that the last worker doesn’t have enough room to work so they are less productive. In fact they are so unproductive that they are costing you more in wages than the extra boxes they are producing. This is the law of diminishing returns. The extra labour input has reached a point that it is not efficient, there is another limiting factor, in this case space. I think, for me, there is an argument that in some situation perfection works in a similar way. Lets suppose that I write one of these articles, and I’m pretty happy with the first draft, but as I read it back I think “hmmm that bit there could flow a little better, and that word there is a little clumsy” so I make those changes and I read it again and something else could do with refining, so I do that, and so on until I reach a point that I am becoming unhappy with the article because each change requires other changes and I am spending so much time and effort getting it right that I end up ruining the article.
Wouldn’t it be better to make a few changes until I am pretty much happy with it and then get it posted up and move on to the next one, which may be better still a I will have learned from the last one? I am beginning to think so. So perhaps not completely perfect, but as perfect as it can be without getting a bit silly really. I will be interested to know what you lot out there think of this as an idea. I think it needs a bit more work on my part to understand where the cut off points are, and how I know when something is approaching diminishing returns, and how I overcome the idea that maybe one more change won’t hurt, when it is quite obvious that it will. Maybe I need to combine this idea with working on my ability to accept things as being good enough? It’s a tricky one, but the core idea remains interesting. Maybe I am more of a perfectionist than I allowed myself to believe, just with a modified idea of perfection as something that isn’t an absolute in the mathematical sense…..
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