Striving too much for perfection will ruin your life. It will wipe out all those little imperfections which are making you… well, human. Being better, on the other side, is rewarding. Look back at the “yesterday you” and just say: I’m better!
Perfection is death camouflaged in beauty. You can’t really be perfect and still be alive. Your life is made out of all those little limitations, all those spots on your immaculate canvas. Eliminating them will make you perfect but it will also take life out of you.
On the other hand, striving to be better stems from accepting your limitations. From acknowledging your imperfection. Most of the time, striving to be perfect will kill any action you may take, just by knowing it’s impossible to be perfect.
Just by accepting that you are not perfect, only improvable, your life will change dramatically. For the better.
How To Be Better
And not perfect, that is. It’s a two step approach, something simple, yet effective. Don’t be mislead by the apparent simplicity, because there’s still a lot of work involved. We don’t have time in a single blog post to dive into all the details, but, believe me, there’s work to do if you want to be better.
So, the first step is be present. It all starts from here. I know, it sounds a little confusing, but believe me, it all starts from here.
Be present in your own life and pay attention to what’s happening with and around you. Then make your choices. Choose consciously to do something, not like a reaction to the environment.
A good example here would be money. Choose consciously a way to make money and then start implement it. As opposed to making money just to pay out debt.
It’s nothing wrong with paying debt, on the contrary, I think it’s great. But if you make the financial part of your activity the main reason to do it, you may end up with something that it’s not fulfilling in the long run, to say the least. Sometimes it may happen, I know, sometimes you really hit it and find a good job, that pays well and in good conditions. Congratulations, stay there. But, more often than that, it happens the other way around. You just go to the job because you have to. You’re forced to. In a way, you become a slave.
And that puts you in a very delicate situation. Not only because you kinda lose your sense of freedom, although it does count. Not only because your emotional field will be poisoned with negative emotions most of the time, although it does count. But because you will not express the best part of you. Because the greatest gift you can give to the world, that thing that only you can give, it’s not there. You chose not to give it, by exchanging it with a well paying job.
And that happened because you were not present. You didn’t choose consciously.
I use this metaphor of “finding your true calling” because it hits a chord in many people. But it’s the same with everything else. It’s the same with relationships. It’s the same with health. We make our choices based on reaction, not conscious action.
And the number one consequence of this, in terms of damage, of course, is the fact that we can’t genuinely express ourselves. We have to play on a very restrictive set of conditions. And, guess what? That set of conditions will block us. We can’t become better, in an aligned sense, if we’re not true to ourselves.
Of course, we can advance on the social ladder, we can get a better position at that job, but it won’t help us to be better. It’s an apparent “better”, it’s not the real one. We just do it for more money (if money was the main reason). Or for more attention (if getting attention was the main reason).
As long as you’re present and make your choices in a way the lets your freedom, creativity and your very core as a human being to manifest, you’re half way there.
So, if you want to be better, that’s the first step: be present.
Then, when you know you took the right decision, just stay there. Do whatever it takes. Do whatever you can. Just wake up in the morning, look at your smile in the mirror (because you will be smiling when you wake up) and ask yourself: how should I play my game today?
Keep working. That’s the second step.
further reading
