My brother’s a furniture builder. An amazing furniture builder with our father’s perfectionist touch.
I’ve always been in awe of his talent, and he’s really good about explaining to me how he’s done something, or a concept he’s trying to sort out in his head.
Recently, he had a contract to build a piece of furniture, but he was given carte blanche to do it his way. As a perfectionist, this became a Catch-22 situation. Clients sometimes have unreasonable exp
ectations, or ideas, and pleasing them is difficult. On the other hand, he has great ideas but there was always the risk that his vision, and the final product, would not be the vision of his clients’.
He set to work, not coming up for air until he was puzzling over the legs. Talking to him on the phone, it didn’t take long to realize I did not follow his explanation at all. He was talking joint talk but he may have well been speaking Klingon!
So he PMed me some pictures.
Then it became clear.
Very impressed, I texted back: “Precision seems to be the operative word.”
His response: “Sometimes it’s in how well you hide the imprecision.”
That simple furniture-builder philosophy bowled me over by how universally applicable the philosophy was.
Precision… perfection… so often it’s a moving target, and it’s all in our ability to create the illusion of precision, or to rely on someone else’s inexperience of precision and perfection. Or perhaps, it’s all in the eye of the beholder: one person’s imprecision can still be another’s precision.
This post has become a rambling series of thoughts but I hope you get my drift: bottom line, that which you view as imprecision, or imperfection, in your self or your life might never be on the radar of someone else.
So carry on: be perfectly imperfect!
Oh, and thanks for the blog post fodder, Bro!