Fuck perfection

Fuck the need to be perfect. Christ! I feel like I’m at alcoholics anonymous. Hi, I’m an Asian blue belt in his forties and I’ve struggled all my life to be perfect. Perfect in school, perfect at work and insidiously, perfect at jiu jitsu. 

Fuck perfect!

Perfect can jump off a cliff and fuckin’ die! It’s easy to say because everyone fuckin’ thinks that. The moment we make a mistake in anything in life, we say to ourselves, “It doesn’t have to be perfect!”. We reassure ourselves that even though we aim for perfection, we can allow small fuckups. Christ, we can’t even go to the supermarket without looking for the perfect fruit and vegetables. America tosses away so much edible produce because it looks imperfect. 

If our food has to be perfect, what chance do we have in being imperfect? 

You know what though? Perfect hinders us. In jiu-jitsu, it hinders us from learning. We look for perfect positions and situations for us to use a move when a “good enough” position would probably lend itself to us just as well. I know this perfect obsession makes me hesitate during a roll, worrying about the next move, and would it be perfect for X technique? What would be better for all of us, would be for us to just try the moves that we want to practice, good, bad or indifferent. No fear of being perfect; no fear of losing to other lower-ranked gym members; No fear of failure. Don’t get me wrong, for all my bluster here for the pros of being imperfect, I know I will be looking for perfect setups and situations during my next roll. Hell, I’m fuckin’ working on it! Recovering perfect addict here!

What is weird, is that the science behind learning is telling us to embrace our imperfections, that we learn best when the learning is challenging. Even if we learn something “perfectly”, we are more prone to forget the “easy” thing that we learn than the challenging topic that would take us time to master. I guess that’s why we all remember our times tables, because I’m sure we all had some negative experiences with them. Mine involved my mother and the welts inflicted by the bamboo end of her feather duster. I’m surely never going to forget. 

Let me get back to the topic of learning and perfection. So, if getting something perfect isn’t the aim of learning something new, what should we aim for? We should aim for the knowledge we want to acquire to become long-term memories. Something that we recall whenever we want to use it, like the ability to ride a bike or to swim. Yes, it took us time and effort to learn to ride a bike or to swim, but those skills we acquire during our youth, and these skills serve us all our lives. We should expect the same for our jiu-jitsu learning.

 My opinion is this: We shouldn’t be perfect. We should aim to achieve a goal; perfection will be a side effect of the repetitions we put into learning a skill. That’s not in any book or a quote from someone famous, but it is my own experience. For everything I’ve learnt, I only got perfect at something because I kept at it and repeatedly tried to reach a goal. It’s like when you teach a newbie white-belt how to shrimp or any of the BJJj basics,  they always look at you in amazement: ”How do you do that so easily?”. How do you explain to them, that having spent a few years in the art and all those things become second natue. Don’t get me wrong, I still can’t invert or do the acrobatic flippy-flippy shit for Jack shit. It doesn’t mean I can’t do it, just that I haven’t dedicated myself to learning those skills and I choose not to expand that part of my jiu jitsu game.

Fuck reputation!

Perfect is also insidious because people base their reputation on one’s own mastery of the art. Mastery of the art usually turns up as perfect technique in the art. I’m sick of people expecting me to be perfect. From my upbringing, I was always compared to other kids. My parents desperately wanted me to be super talented and amazing, but I’m really not that guy. Nothing comes easy to me and I struggle to put shit together when people “smarter” and more coordinated than me pick things up. 

What I lack in terms of “smarts”, I make up with dedication. I will do what is required to achieve a goal. It’s slow and for me, learning can be tedious and exhausting, but like the Jackson five, “I’ll be there!”. That’s what I hope for everyone reading this column, fuck being the perfect person that society expects you to be. Be messy, but learn things through dedication and repetitions.