By wasting the past fifteen minutes trying to think of the wittiest way to launch this new blog, I’ve already violated the spirit of its intent.
As the title implies, this blog is not about how I achieved perfection, and am passing on my tips to anyone who is game enough to read them. I am a former English major and librarian who is now the full-time caretaker of my home and family. I am not an expert in any of the fields I will blog about.
The Internet is full of amazingly generous people: experts who create quality content and post it just because they want to help strangers. And when you can search for — and, in mere seconds, find — a lesson on a topic as narrow as how to bust up the ice in your driveway, you eventually conclude that just about everyone is an expert on something.
But for many of us, a large part of our days is spent doing things that we aren’t especially good at. Believing that we lack the skills or specialized knowledge to do these tasks really well, we hesitate. Hesitation becomes procrastination. Procrastination escalates to excuse-making. Excuse-making plummets, sometimes, to an overwhelming inertia.
When the tasks before you involve home maintenance and child care, that initial hesitation to tackle a difficult task is understandable but potentially disastrous if carried to the next level. Ready or not, the kids get older and the roof keeps leaking.
The purpose of this blog, then, is to document my efforts to do a good enough job at the tasks that occupy my time. Rarely do the results of my efforts rise to the level of awesome. But I’ve noticed that if I overcome that craving for awesomeness and just jump in, eventually I do achieve “good enough.”
Sometimes when I have used the Internet to search for DIY guidance, recipes, or parenting advice, I’ve been discouraged by the bloggers’ insistence on perfection. Don’t use dried herbs instead of fresh, for heaven’s sake. Make sure you use fourteen coats of varnish on that bench; if you stop at thirteen, you’re a hack woodworker. You bottle fed your baby? Too greedy to share your antibodies, were you?
In documenting my efforts to achieve “good enough” status, I’m not embracing mediocrity. Far from it. I actually care about and enjoy the work that occupies my time, and I’d like to be good at it. But perfectionism’s worst outcome is that is sometimes stops us from ever taking the first step. Hard to be perfect when you’re doing nothing at all.