Good, better, best

"Best is good, better is best."
- Novelist Lisa Grunwald, as quoted in The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
- Translated from Voltaire

As long as I can remember I have aimed to be perfect. Before you scoff at me remember that our original goals and dreams are set in childhood when we don't grasp reality and when everything is cast in black and white.  I wanted the white, unspotted robes, the glowing countenance, the halo floating overhead.  The stained glass windows in church and the paintings in the Sunday School building definitely played a part in my imagery of 'perfect.'

Unfortunately these goals lingered through late childhood and early adulthood - even on into my first few years of parenting, when it all fell apart.  Straight A's, glowing performance reviews, good times in swim competitions, those all faded away as I realized how difficult parenting was, and how far I was from perfect. My goal (again set in childhood) was always to be like Marmee in Little Women. When I realized that truth and spoke it aloud in the past few years, I got a lot of headshakes. "If you compare yourself to a fictional character," one said, "you will never come out on top."

Which leads me to the point: we don't have to come out on top, but we do need to be better, in order to achieve happiness. Growth is essential to our sense of self, and we only need to improve day over day, year over year, to find real happiness. Perfection is not the goal - can't be the goal. If we strive for it, the failure will rob us of our peace.

When I looked up the Voltaire quote on Wikipedia, I found a few others that I enjoyed. Here they are for your reading pleasure:

 "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes." - British radar developer Watson-Watt

 George Stigler is attributed for the adage "If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good