Q: IS PERFECTIONISM a blessing or a curse?
It is a blessing when it is the driving force for great achievement.
It is a curse when the quest for great achievement creates chaos, neglect, and imbalance in other areas of your life.
It is a blessing when it inspires the artist to create what the mind imagines.
It is a curse when the mind becomes too tunnel-visioned and one-dimensional.
It is a gift when the winemaker persists in finding the precise grape, climate, texture.
It is a curse when the pursuit of the perfect grape negatively impacts the bottom line.
It is a gift when the architect pays the attention to detail that makes the building an edifice of beauty, safety, representation and functionality.
It is a curse when the planning process never ends and gets lost in far too much minutia resulting in wasted opportunity.
Perfectionism ensures that the chef fully comprehends the blending and interaction of ingredients down to the microscopic compounds in the dishes that they create.
Perfectionism helps the composer, poet, and writer to craft a work of beauty from random words which in turn touches the heart and mind.
It is perfectionism that inspires an exceptional web designer to use a series of keystrokes to turn ordinary code into an extraordinary website.
Perfectionism has also given us some of our most wondrous works of art that are both visually and intellectually appealing.
Perfectionists search for ways to make the complex simple, visualize the perfect outcome, and work with an obsessive sense of conviction to make their vision a reality.
Yes, perfectionism is both a blessing and a curse.
Learning to balance between pragmatism and perfection is a difficult act, one that takes time to learn as the perfectionist often acts from a position of high integrity, ethical sensitivity and compelling idealism.
Gary Ryan Blair
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