Today’s TED Talk by Sarah Lewis contains an interesting discussion on Success versus Mastery. I’ll let the video speak for itself but wanted to extend something I was writing about a few days ago on perfection.
If success is doing something right one time and mastery is about being able to do it time and time again, Sarah has stated that it is important to celebrate the near wins as small failures are necessary to achieve mastery.
This means though that a perfectionist will never achieve mastery due to an obsession with small successes. Instead of being able to let go when perfect success is not achieved and trying again, the perfectionist will devote entirely too much time to each success and thus never achieve mastery.
The perfectionist will never produce the volume of work necessary to learn to become a master so in itself, perfectionism is the ultimate failure.
Anyone, enough of my sometimes incoherent ramblings. Watch Sarah.