Annie LaMott: "Perfectionism Is The Voice Of The Oppressor"

http://davincidilemma.com/2012/06/how-your-perfectionism-affects-others/

Religion and Perfectionism

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/11/religion-and-perfectionism.html

"Is Perfectionism A Curse? Paul Ryan Tells The Truth"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/09/paul-ryan-tells-truth.html

"You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image 

when it turns out God hates all the same people you do."
Tom Weston S. J.

In her indispensable Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (public library) – one of the finest books on writing ever written, a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound – Anne Lamott explores how perfectionism paralyzes us creatively.

She recounts this wonderful anecdote, after which the book is titled:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

In this bird-by-bird approach to writing, there is no room for perfectionism. (Neil Gaiman famously advised, “Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.” and David Foster Wallace admonished, “If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”) Lamott cautions:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.

[…]

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.

Read more here and couple with Lamott on how to stop keeping yourself small by people-pleasing.

"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice.  The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization.  We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal.  Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good.  The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”  

"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton

More Merton Quotes

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/merton-best-imposed-as-norm-becomes.html