Being Perfect by Anna Quindlen

The book Being Perfect is all about setting yourself free from the "perfection trap" and turning outward societal admonitions for change into inward reflections of choices.

Perfection—even the illusion thereof—is hard work. Always having to stay on top of duties and a step ahead of expectations while the rules keep changing. And why is this thankless job undertaken? Solely to be perfect. So the goal is perfection itself, not the pursuit of excellence in the tasks being accomplished.

There is also an issue of scale here. The world has to be a small place so that there are a limited number of tasks that need to be done perfectly. If there are now many more tasks to be done, then it quickly becomes physically impossible to do everything perfectly. Or if those originally limited choices become much more challenging, then again, it becomes physically impossible to achieve perfection in every task.

"Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion."

However, this burden of successfully completing this goal of perfection is at once unbearable and also too easy.

It's easy, because all it requires of you is "to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be and to assume the masks necessary to be the best at whatever the zeitgeist dictates or requires." But this in itself is its greatest limitation. It leaves no room for creativity or innovation or even beauty.

So, when you give up being perfect, you invite beauty into your life along with uncertainty and failure. Terror, even. At the same time, if you give up meeting society's expectations and disapprovals of you, that burden of perfection melts away.

Quindlen advises: "Begin with that most frightening of all things, a clean slate. And then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: Because they are what I want, or wish for. Because they reflect who and what I am."