WHAT PERFECTION REALLY DEMANDS
Perfection is subjective. Perfectionism is the unreasonable and self-defeating ambition of
getting something absolutely right - which makes us difficult to be around and punishing to
live within. The origins of perfectionism lie in the imagination.
In the ease with which we can conjure up a picture of an ideal state of affairs compared with
the monstrous difficulty of bringing such a state into being by ourselves. The sickness of
perfectionism just states in a fertile gap between our noble visions and our mediocre reality
and yet our problems do not ultimately arise just in our love of perfection.
Our perfectionism starts to torture us when we lack information on how hard others had to
work and how much they had to suffer before reaching their ideas of perfection. It strikes
when we imagine we might write a good novel in six months or have a good career by the
age of 30 or have worked out spontaneously how to have a successful marriage. The
problem isn't that we're aiming for perfection. It's that we don't have an accurately
redemptive idea of what perfection really demands.