"Perfectionism," wrote writer and thinker Anne Lamott "is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life." Many artists suffer under this suffocating force that stops people from beginning something, and if they make it that far, then definitely from finishing it. This animated musing on perfectionism by The School of Life offers a clever insight into where this desire to reach the unattainable perfect comes from.

"Without in any way revealing or even perhaps being aware of it, our media edits out billions of unremarkable lives, and years of failure and frustration even in those who do achieve in order to service us up a daily curated selection of peak career moments which end up seeming not like the violent exceptions they actually are but like the normal baseline of achievement ... We have forgotten to imagine the oceans of ters and despair that necessarily surround those who are successful."

As this video so rightly points out, when we look at the work of those we admire, the story we see is one of infinite success, a shiny version of what we know must be a messy life. For aren't all lives and career paths fundamentally messy? 

"Our perspective is imbalanced because we know our struggles so well from the inside and yer are expose to apparently pain-free narratives of achievements on the outside. We cannot forgive ourselves the horrors of the early drafts, largely because we have not been exposed to the early drafts of those we admire."

There is a calling in the video to return to the works of your heroes and seek out the early drafts, find the pieces of work that actually aren't that good. Find, if you can, the records of the ones that didn't make the cut. For there you can see how they learned from their own failure. And this is what every needs to do to reach excellence.

"We need to recognise the legitimate and necessary role of failure, allow ourselves to do things quite imperfectly for a very logn time as a prce we cannot avoif paying for an opportunity one day, perhaps in many decaes to do something that others will consider spontaneous success."

And if you need some more reading around this, dig deep into some of these:

This article from Maria Papova at Brainpickings: Anne Lamott on Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity
"Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing."

This collection of authors talking about their rules for writing: The Guardian's 10 Rules for Writing Fiction
"Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving." - Neil Gaiman

Blank on Blank's animated video interview with David Foster Wallace talking about ambition
"You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything."

In a beautiful exploration of her work Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Brainpickings Maria Papova, she considers the