When I was in the first or maybe it was second grade, my school conducted a test for all students my age. I later learned that it was a comprehensive IQ test. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but it was presented to us youngsters as “a very important test.”
Even at that young age, I had learned that very important tests were . . . very important, and that I was both expected to do well and capable of doing well. My exceptional performance was clearly anticipated.
I don’t know my exact score received, but I do know that it fell short of perfection. I precisely remember missing the word needed to identify and label an image of a sled made of slats and with an upward curve at the front—the kind I would later see in movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story—both unknown to me in first grade.
The word needed, which my vocabulary at least partly lacked at that time, was “toboggan.” I studied the image and the word choices. “Sled” was not among them. “Toboggan” was, but I knew what that meant: It was a knit winter hat, and I even owned one, and it had a multi-colored pom attached to the top.
When my score came back and I saw that I had missed associating “toboggan” with the sled, choosing another word instead as the best educated guess I could make at the time, I was perturbed. Clearly the test-makers were wrong! A toboggan was a hat, not a sled. Indignant, I complained to my mother, a teacher, and the holder of the majority of the knowledge I had accumulated at that point in my short life.
She then informed me that the word toboggan could, indeed, apply to both a hat and a sled like the one pictured.
And my indignation pivoted. I had been proved wrong, and it stung, and I was sure, it was not my fault for not knowing! She was my teacher, and my short-of-perfection performance was due to her failure to anticipate and teach me this one application of a word I had not yet experienced in my seven years as a resident of a Deep South state that rarely saw freezing temperatures, much less enough snow to call out sledders, or tobogganers.
“Why didn’t you tell me?!” I demanded, my anger apparent, according to the way she recalled the incident.
A few days later, my mother produced for me a small plaque, acquired at the local Christian book and trinkets shop. It was a small brown wooden board, perhaps three inches by five inches, varnished to a shine, with an engraved matte veneer centered on it, and these words:
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths.”
Together we placed that plaque on the hutch of the new dresser set my parents had recently allowed me to pick out at a real furniture store. It stood on that shelf for decades—long after I had left for college and moved into my first apartment and married. It was a fixture there and probably the first bit of scripture I ever committed to memory.
I am and have been since before I can remember, a perfectionist. While there are some benefits to perfectionism, there are also many burdens. One of those burdens is the inability to graciously and immediately accept the very real reality that I will fail, or be incomplete, or need to adjust along the way.
In many ways, this is in contrast to another aspect of my nature which is a deep curiosity and a willingness to be taught. I do love to learn. But under the pressure of performance, I have always wanted—no, expected—to be already complete. To perform very well. To not miss the mark when measured.
A previous supervisor once called out my perfectionism, to which I replied, “I don’t think I’m a perfectionist. I’m almost a perfectionist.” He laughed and solidified his argument: “Only a true perfectionist would ever even say, ‘I’m almost a perfectionist.’” I haven’t even adequately perfected my perfectionism.
As the years roll by, I am slowly realizing that perfectionism is quantumly entangled with insecurity. Being detail-oriented and meticulous is a way of seeing and operating that is good in many situations. But needing to always be measured by the standard of perfection is an inner spotlight on insecurity. If failing to rise to the level of perfection when analyzed, tested, measured is a blow to identity, a reason to turn to victimhood and blame (the first grader demanding, “Why didn’t you tell me?!”), then it certainly suggests that another valuable and desirable trait may still need further development: I’m not talking just about grace for others and self, or meekness and humility though those are just as certainly paramount, but adaptability, adjustability.
I like systems. I like processes. Most of my life has progressed through “sink or swim” introductions. I expect it’s this way for most of us. We step into a new role and are told, “Make it work.” And so we do. We don’t come in with a clear blueprint or even a full toolbox. We are set down before a challenge at point A, or maybe at points B or C, and told to find a way to the end. Maybe the end is identified clearly—achieve this goal. Maybe it’s even more vague: We need to get from here to points E and G, and eventually we’d like to attain Q, and then in time, a very mature and perfect Z. Figure it out. Innovate. Gamble, even.
I have developed many processes and systems over time. None were automatic. None worked with perfection initially or immediately. None were crafted exclusively by me either. It is impossible to anticipate or intuit every scenario, every variation, every possible alteration or obstacle or adjustment that will be needed, but to be sure—every challenge will have many.
The laws of scientific observation and application work here as well, in all of life’s work: Plan, test, observe, evaluate, adjust. Try again. When one of my daughter’s science fair projects didn’t prove its hypothesis, a scientist friend of ours encouraged her, saying, “That’s what most of my job is. Looking at what I’ve just done and saying, ‘Well, that didn’t work.’“ And still, we keep on. We test our attempts, our processes, our systems. We see what did and didn’t work. We learn, we adjust, we try again. An unproven hypothesis is not a failure. It’s a different form of success that serves as a vital steppingstone to the next hypothesis.
I didn’t have that mindset as a first grader. Who would? I have to remind myself now, regularly, that to find need of more information, or to adjust that which was initiated after giving it some testing isn’t the same as failure. It isn’t even a negative thing at all. It is an opportunity to learn and to grow more and to move closer to the final and mature and perfect goal we want, we hope for, we strive for.
It’s still progress.
And under God’s grace, we actually have the freedom to fail. Freedom to fail and grace to grow.
If we didn’t, grace wouldn’t be grace after all. And that should free even a perfectionist to bounce back from the reality of imperfections, shouldn’t it? “Lean not on your own understanding“ doesn’t mean don’t learn. It doesn’t mean don’t add to your knowledge. But keep it in its right place. Perfectionism may tend toward usurping God’s proper place, or the proper places of those who do have more knowledge, more experience, or who simply want to see you grow and stretch and thrive because you've faced a challenge, failed, and had to figure out another way.
