Perfectionism

I have always loved the raw honesty of Anne Lamott when she talks about the perfectionism struggle...I needed to hear this today. I hope you like these quotes too.

We all need to practice allowing space for ourselves to make creative mistakes. And yes, it's a practice circumventing our egos because the ego wants to step in and protect itself from bruising by being controlling.

Messes, mistakes, that's how we learn. Make a good creative laboratory for yourself, a no judging space! My spittoon notebook is blather to clean out my ears and heart and mind. I turn over and aerate the soil so new things can flow and grow. Does that make sense?

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. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it. Anne Lamott

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow 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. Anne Lamott

Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen. Anne Lamott

Musicians have a language for this too.

 

There’s no such thing as a wrong note.

  — Art Tatum

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

 — Miles Davis

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards

 that makes it right or wrong. 

 — Miles Davis

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

 —Joseph Chilton Pearce

There are no mistakes in jazz - you are always a semitone from salvation! 

— church joke

There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others. 

—Thelonius Monk  

Do not fear mistakes. There are none. 

— Miles Davis

There are no wrong notes, only wrong resolutions.

— Bill Evans

I think of all harmony as an expansion and a return to the tonic.

— Bill Evans

There are no wrong notes on the piano, just better choices.

—Thelonious Monk

I played the wrong, wrong notes.

—Thelonious Monk