There are two perfectionists.
The first perfectionist believes every piece he makes has to be perfect.
So his first piece never gets finished. With the skill of someone who’s never finished anything, nothing he makes meets his standards. He revises and revises, deletes and rewrites.
To this day, no one has ever seen his work.
The second perfectionist is after perfection too.
But strangely, he keeps putting out new work. Most of it isn’t good, but some of it is pretty good. When something fails, it hurts him too. But before long, he’s put out the next one. And the next one is usually a little better than the last.
He’s still a perfectionist. It’s just that the perfection he’s after is bigger, further away.
What he wants to make perfect isn’t any single piece.
It’s his life.
Every piece is just one brushstroke in it.
Some strokes look crooked on their own. In the whole painting, they fit just right.
