Although I've never been perfect in writing or anything else, for many years I was a perfectionist.
In junior and senior high school I frequently stayed up late revising term papers (if the subject interested me) to make them better. And this was when we used typewriters, not PCs with word processing software.
While a writer on my college newspaper, I became copy editor, and even got a part-time job as a proofreader at the printer, to ensure that nobody else screwed up my words.
When I was an advertising copywriter, I was notorious for not "releasing" an ad, because I wanted to make it better and better.
I finally ended my obsession when an older and wiser man told me that "sometimes good enough really is good enough, and if you strive for perfection, you'll never complete anything." He also revealed the sad results of a study that showed that most people looked at the pictures in an ad and maybe read the headline, but they seldom read the "body copy" that I tried so hard to make perfect.
I later developed my own corollary: "while lots of things make a difference, few differences matter."
A lot of what human beings think is important, may not be.
Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane wisely said, "It don't mean shit to a tree."
When dealing with someone who could not make an unimportant decision, I often said, "5,000 years from now, who'll give a shit?"
I knew a man who refused to buy a color TV, even in the 1990s, because "it's not perfected yet." After he died, his widow bought several.
Most human beings wear eyeglasses. The human eye was developed for spotting distant food and predators, not staring at PC monitors. Evolution has not happened fast enough.
Even people are not perfected yet. But we're good enough.
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