By Jim Hagarty
2018
I am a perfectionist and I’ve used that characteristic to explain why I sometimes have trouble completing things. I can’t finish a project until I know it will be perfect. Something I hear other people say, “Well, that’ll be good enough” is not in my vocabulary. I have always been aware that perfectionism is the enemy of creativity, but have also seen how a desire to do things flawlessly can lead to a few things being done flawlessly. As a society, we sometimes praise the perfectionists among us and sometimes we don’t.
One thing that is very difficult to do is to change a perfectionist. To do that, you would probably have to do something about the interior fear that perfectionism is based on. Something along the lines of, “The world won’t love me unless the things I produce while I am here are perfect.” Find a way to change that and you will change the world.
I don’t read as much as I should or keep up with things, but I wonder if there has been some connection made between perfectionism and obsessive compulsive disorder. Or maybe they are considered the same thing these days. Maybe there is a scale with mild perfectionism on the lower end and severe OCD at the higher.
Whatever the situation, at 67, you might think I would have some of this figured out by now but occasionally I discover new insights. Today, for example, I was asked to part with eight plastic peanut butter jar by someone who, like me, wants to use them to organize small things in his shop. A few years ago, I built myself some shelves in the garage which now hold 80 jars, all filled with little bits of this and that according to category. This is the second time someone has admired my system and asked me to share eight jars with them.
But I have a problem. Most of my 80 jars were once filled with smooth peanut butter and therefore came with green lids. But I also have several jars which held crunchy butter and they came with red lids. I also have one jar with a white lid. I don’t know what it orginally contained. So, my issue is this. I don’t mind giving away another eight jars. At the rate I go through smooth peanut butter, they will be replaced very soon. However, I can’t bear to carry on any longer with mostly green lids mixed in with a few lids of other colours. So I spent some time this morning removing red lids from jars I was keeping and putting them on the ones I was giving away. My goal is to have all 80 of my jars with matching green lids. Thankfully, I found eight red lids, put them on eight jars, stuffed them in a plastic bag and they are off to their new owner. He probably won’t care about the lids but it gave me a good feeling to know he is getting nothing but red. And soon I will be able to stand proudly in front of a wall of 80 peanut butter jars with green lids. And I will feel very good about that.
Not ever having been anyone other than me, I can only guess there are probably a lot of people in the world who, having adopted my jar system, wouldn’t care one flying fig what colour the lids on the jars were, so long as they had lids. There might even be some folks who would be content to keep some jars that had no lids at all. Or they might substitute some glass jam jars for the plastic peanut butter ones. Or keep some of their small items in mismatching cardboard containers.
These are odd people and I wish I could fix them but I probably can’t. If they can’t see the value in 80 green jar lids, they are probably beyond my help.
