Perfect is the enemy

[merrileemakes]

It's been a while since I showed this cross stitch project. It got sent to time out for a while because I noticed that something, somehwere had gone wrong and I got frustrated. I was going to ignore the miskates and make a post about how it was an imperfect cross stitch, which was a first for me, and isn't that a lovely bit of growth, moving past perfectionism, blah blah. Buuuuut, I'm not there yet. I did have to fix it.


But this year I am working on not striving for perfectionism. I am keen to embrace the warm comfort of mediocracy, focus less on achieving and just being. This might sound like hippy-dippy bullshit or new age quiet quitting/tang ping but it's actually backed by science. So you could say I am slacking off or you could say I am optimising my performance in line with Yerkes-Dodson Law.

At the end of last year, award-winning filmmaker, writer, runner and general oddball Beau Miles posted a video The Beauty of Mediocracy. It's a compilation of projects and ideas that just didn't work out, for a variety of reasons. Beau showcased his mediocre work, highlighted what he learned from each piece and also mused on the beauty, and necessity, of doing mediocre work if you want to make something great. I was really inspired by his words, so much so that I made some anti-inspirational images to help me embrace the beauty of mediocracy.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

If you're not making any mistakes, you're not learning, you're coasting.

It's why I often post pictures of craft projects that show how I worked through a problem.

[matsushima]

This might sound like hippy-dippy bullshit or new age quiet quitting/tang ping but it's actually backed by science. So you could say I am slacking off or you could say I am optimising my performance in line with Yerkes-Dodson Law.
My boss looooooves to talk about "evidence-based best practice" and it would be so satisfying to tell him that, from now on, I am not going above and beyond for anything, ever, because the science shows that stressing yourself out is bad for your work performance, so… sorry, but whatever it is, I can't help you. (There is evidence that students with burned out teachers do worse academically and I've sent him that study but he does not actually care about "evidence based best practice.")