Ever feel like your accomplishments just aren’t living up to what you expected. Maybe you’re hoping for more money? Or looking for your purpose?
Well, you’re not alone!
In today’s world, it’s easy to get the impression that everything has to be perfect in order to feel like you’ve found success. We all share our “best selves” on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat to impress our friends, family, and colleagues. We make our lives “seem” perfect, but we are all flawed humans and anything but perfect.
But should we still strive for perfection? This is a question that was asked today while I was at Amplify Church in Pittsburgh where the guest pastor Sam Collier started out the service with the following clip from the film Friday Night Lights
This is a scene from the football team’s final game of the film where they are competing for the state championship.
Throughout the film leading up to this moment, the coach is always telling the team they have to be “perfect” in order to win the State Championship so they can live up to their small town’s expectations.
Is Perfection Possible?
The coach knows that the players can’t actually achieve real perfection. They can’t catch every single pass. They won’t make every single tackle. The task of “being perfect” is something that is placed on them even though it is impossible to achieve.
So why would the coach impose perfection on his team?
One reason is so that this movie can teach us an important lesson to use in our own lives. I don’t know about you, but I find myself placing extremely high expectations on myself and create delusions of achieving perfection.
For example, when I write these blogs, I often overthink the writing process. I go back over my writing and continue to edit and revise until I feel like it is “finally perfect” and appropriate to share with the world.
But the problem with this setting of such high expectations is that nothing will ever be perfect. I often find myself writing a blog or creating a video and then never even publishing it because I overthink things, decide it isn’t good enough to publish, then feel like I failed for wasting time on a task that resulted in failure.
As much as I’m hoping it’s not true, I wouldn’t be surprised if you may have just thought of something in your own life where you just said, “Oh, I do that with X!” or “That’s totally like when I do Y!”.
We all do it, especially in such a socially critical world where we’re all judged by how many likes and comments we get as we share our lives digitally and compare ourselves to friends and even celebrities online.
But if perfection is impossible, should we still strive to achieve it?
Define Your Definition of Perfection
That’s where the lesson in Friday Night Lights lies. Throughout the entire movie, the team is told they have to be perfect. If they aren’t perfect, they’ll let the town down and be failures.
But throughout the entire film, the football team is never told what perfection actually is!
It’s not until the very end of the film that the coach defines what perfection is for them. It’s not about never dropping a pass. It’s not about never missing a tackle.
Perfection for them is knowing that they left everything on the field. Being able to look every teammate in the eyes and know that the other gave it his all.
“Being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It’s not about winning. It’s about you and your relationship to yourself, your family, and your friends….knowing that you told the truth…and did everything that you could for them.” – Friday Night Lights
So you may be thinking, “Well, yeah. That’s good and all, but how does that relate to me and my problems?”
Yes, that’s a ‘feel good’ message that may seem cliche at first glance. But as Sam Collier explained his interpretation of this scene, it really opened my eyes to an excellent way to look at and interpret my own life.
The entire movie – the players’ friends, coaches, parents, even the police put pressure on the team to be perfect. It’s not until the end of the movie when everything is on the line that the coach final unveils what the perfection they were striving for actually was.
How to Manage Expectations of Perfection
In life, this is often what we do to ourselves. We put so much pressure on ourselves to be perfect that we are never satisfied and often terrified of what will happen if we don’t succeed.
But what if we don’t fully understand what our final perfection may be? What if the perfection we are striving for is not actually the perfection we should be working toward? And most importantly, perfection is something that is never actually attainable!
We can only hope that we set our goals and expectations in a direction that striving for that perfection will bring us closer to the people we want to be. We should base our choices not on achieving specific accomplishments, but on developing a mental and moral fortitude to continue striving for perfect regardless of the outcome.
Focus on Mental and Moral Fortitude
When the coach from Friday Night Lights says that it’s not about the scoreboard, he’s showing that the team’s mental and moral fortitude is what’s important. If they get knocked down, they get back up again and continue to leave everything on the field. They do their absolute best so they can look their teammates in the eyes and know that they gave it everything they had.
This is a perfection that could be worth striving for. If you live your life with this approach to the choices you make, even when the world feels like it just keeps knocking you down, you are strong enough to get back up and fight again.
Personally, I have felt much more aligned with this approach recently. There were moments recently where I found myself trying to manage expectations that were too high and when I didn’t achieve them I felt like I had failed. This is a thing Scott Adams would call “loserThink”. It’s an unproductive way to look at things.
Which Person Do You Want To Be – Positive or Negative?
Sam Collier gave a good example as a way to visualize this. He said imagine that a gym trainer told you that they would help you lose 20 lbs over the next 6 months. After 6 months had passed, you had only lost 15 lbs. Did the gym trainer lie and deceive you?
One type of person would say that the trainer failed, or worse yet…lied and owes you your money back!
Another type of person would say that you made excellent progress along a positive path and the overall result was a massive success.
In my opinion, it’s pretty clear that one way makes you feel like you failed and the other makes you feel like you’ve succeeded. The choice is yours on which way you want to look at it and which type of person you would like to be.
The positive approach is the one I have chosen to follow because I don’t like to feel like a failure. I am now able to set lofty goals for achievement and even if I only make it 75% of the way toward that goal and don’t get everything exactly right, I am still able to view the journey as a massive success and feel like a winner.
From my experience, more often than not…the results of your work will surpass the original expectations you would have set for yourself.
Give it a try, you might enjoy the results!