The Groove Issue 93 - Strive for Excellence, Not Perfection
STRIVE FOR EXCELLENCE, NOT PERFECTION
What if the standards that you have set for yourself are strangling your best ideas and your full creative expression?
A new study published by the British Journal of Psychology closely monitored two groups of students, one that was looking for excellence versus another that was striving for flawlessness. The results showed that the latter scored lower at creative thinking, original solutions, and associative tasks.
The reason is that those who aim for perfection are rigid, unwilling to experiment (to avoid making any mistakes), and unduly critical of their own performance. This goes against the one consistent trait in the most creative people in history: openness to experiences.
Finding Excellence
Grace Hartigan in LIFE magazine, May 13, 1957.
The biggest female artist in the 1950s in the United States was Grace Hartigan. She had started as an Abstract Expressionist, befriending Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell.
As the AbEx painter she was in the beginning of her career, she focused on being visceral, and working around canvases in ways that weren’t premeditated.
It was the opposite of trying to find perfection. But she wasn’t married to any style and whenever the mood struck, she painted figurative works, sometimes still lifes, sometimes a mix of everything, even as her peers criticized her for not staying committed to pure abstraction.
Hartigan never committed to a definitive style, on purpose. Clockwise from the top: Summer Street, 1956; Marilyn, 1962; Still Life With Blue Wall, 1953.
Luckily, Hartigan was very secure in herself and excited about exploring her full creative potential while pushing for excellence in her compositions and color combinations. Unlike other painters of her generation, she never adopted a repetitive style. “No rules,” she demanded, “I must be free to paint anything I feel.”
For her, the door was always open as to how her best work was to be achieved.
She was the opposite of a perfectionist, and in an interview with writer Julie Haifley, Hartigan reflected on the times when she may have looked for it: “I've overworked paintings and often I've destroyed them because you lose the spontaneity, you lose surface, you lose the light, you've killed it and you dump it.”
In one entry of her journals, she said it best: “I am aiming at something better—to please myself. Success seems to me a result, not a goal.”
The Antidote
How do you move past perfectionism?
Much in the same way Grace Hartigan managed her career: a willingness to experiment, change and pivot, knowing that failure is at times inevitable, and that some projects will take off and please others and some won’t.
Separate yourself from external pressures that impose trends rather than pushing for your own professional growth in ways that are meaningful and honest to you.
Hartigan, as art critic Irving Sandler put it, “simply dismissed the vicissitudes of the art market, the succession of new trends in the art world. This didn't in any real or important way affect her. Grace [was] the real thing.”
Similarly, Wharton professor Adam Grant interviewed London School of Economics’ psychologist Thomas Curran on his podcast WorkLife and both men confessed to being victims of perfectionism.
Curran said that “it's something that we value in this kind of culture… when you see perfection all around you and you think everybody else is perfect, then of course, you're going to think perfection is desirable, obtainable.”
The antidote is to allow yourself to fail without making a huge deal out of it or covering it up as if each professional misstep was a taboo.
The bottom line, as Curran told Grant, is that “We need to slow down. And we need to accept that we're going to fail and we're going to fail many, many times”.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
I’ve put together a free webinar for those of you who are not members of my online course, Jumpstart. If you’d like to watch it, please register here.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
I was a guest of Nicholas Wilton in his podcast Art2Life and we recorded a pretty awesome interview. You can listen here.
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
I am super thrilled to announce that my book won the International Book Award in the Business/Entrepreneurship category!
Have you already gotten your copy?
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook. Get it here.
TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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