Meaning of Being a Perfectionist

Though perfection means having zero tolerance, perfectionism does not mean to ensure zero tolerance, but to keep it in mind in order to do one’s best as a performer and work for minimizing tolerance in the performance. This target makes the performer to go on improving his/her performance every time, all the time.

Perfectionism, being indeed unachievable, has been thrown to trash by many persons. I pity them and differ with them on their notion of it. In-spite of my conviction, like everybody else, that the perfection is never achievable, I am adamant on being a staunch votary of pursuing perfectionism. Here is my logic.

How many shooters hit their targets right? I think very few are able to do that. Those who often miss the target for being novices or for other reasons of their own, should they forget about the target and keep on shooting in the air without any objective? I think, your unanimous answer would be 'no' because there has to be an objective target for making efforts to hit that. Same thing is true for being a perfectionist wherein the target remains without ensuring the targeted outcome.

With an aim for achieving perfection, most of the time you are not going to achieve it, but you will do your best in your performance if that remains your target. Nobody can be a good performer without having a target in mind similarly, nobody can do his/her best without perfection as the target. Therefore, every perfectionist aims at doing his/her best, and with every new effort, he/she finds him/her closer to perfection than before.

What is true about perfectionism is true about ideology too, which I discussed in another article of mine on functionality of intellect and wisdom. Ideology too remains unachievable in most of routine actions of a person, yet its remaining as his/her standard norm, the person gets wiser day after day and goes on moving closer to it. Had there been no preset ideology, there won't be any target for achieving with the performance becoming without any objective.

What creates doubt in people’s mind about perfection is its intolerance to deviation, while tolerance essentially remains a way of life for each of us. With tolerance remaining unspecified in definition of perfection, it is not set at all but measured on the outcome for reducing it further in the next effort. This remains the objective of the perfectionist. The deviations in outcome from being the perfect may be different for different fields, at different times for different performers. But surely, the perfection must remain everyone’s target which means trying to do the best to minimize the deviation.   

Thus, perfectionism is not a mere slogan but a practical way to go on improving performance with a hope to become perfect some day.