Excellence versus Perfection

So i've been rocking out of late, too hard perhaps. You know, hangover, wake up, work, surf, begin drinking again, repeat. It's wrecking havoc on my rig and I need a break. Maybe after next weekend. Or maybe after the 4th of July, so a couple weekends. Ah, fuck it, it's summer, I'm young.

I got an email from a friend last week and just got around (read: finally put down intoxicants long enough) to reading it. It was one of those chain emails and it was by Jay Leno, certainly not one of my heroes, and someone who I think is pretty damn annoying and not too funny. Nonetheless the note said that 69% of Americans are unhappy with the direction of the country then goes on to cite a bunch of reasons why America isn't doing quite so bad: running water and electricity, cars everywhere, safety basically guaranteed everywhere, etc.

The cerebral side of me wanted to pick a few of the items apart before systematically and symbolically ripping Leno a new one, but I got one important message, and one I learned from the friend who sent it to me. Americans strive to live in perfection. We are taught from a young age to make things perfect, our food is ultra-manicured (though you don't realize it until you try food in other countries), our sidewalks look perfect, and we constantly try to battle age with money.

Herein lies the problem: we must strive to live in excellence rather than live in perfection. If we try to live in perfection we will never be satisfied because perfection is impossible. There is always something to be improved upon. The professor in my Chinese Buddhism course a couple years ago talked a lot about different types of attachment. The strongest one is ego-attachment. Someone who is ego-attached is attached to an idea of the self and the idea that there is something constant and undying within that self that is capable of producing the same, perfect results consistently. We change all the time so there is no permanent self.

Perfection isn't such a great goal anyway. Perfection implies that there is a model or mold for how something much be done and leaves no room for change. Columbus, Einstein, Edison, Darwin, Socrates, and scores of other legendary thinkers and doers were absolutely dissatisfied with the status quo. They wanted to make something that was new and excellent, not just old and perfected. Socrates said to question everything, Edison followed suit and added action to produce a light bulb. Was it perfect? Far from, but it worked and produced a model upon which future engineers could improve.

This was a great lesson for me on which to end my day. It was a day in which I woke up with a headache and too little sleep, went to work and was bored for 8 hours, then surfed like shit in shitty waves. It may have been subpar, but at least I had a great time last night, have a job, and got to ride my bike to surf in warm water. Subpar for me, and far from perfect, but in retrospect, pretty excellent.