You will never satisfy your need for perfection. Seeking perfection, you ensure that you will feel frustrated in the relative world, for the perfection you seek is unattainable. A need for perfection is insatiable. Even if you attain it today, tomorrow it will get wrinkled. You can iron a dress to perfection, but you can be sure that the perfection will not last when you wear it. Wearing the dress is comparable to living life. And even if somehow you could keep wrinkles away from the dress, tomorrow you might not like the dress anymore and you would yearn for a new perfection.

Those who are energized to achieve, see, or have perfection may have a hesitation about life. They are putting off life. They put this insatiable perfection ahead of getting done what is before them.

In seeking perfection you put standards above action. It is like you enjoy making a pie crust so much, you would rather play with the dough than make the pie. In the end, it doesn't really matter so much how pleasing the crust is to your eye. It matters the taste of the pie.

There is a great amount of judgment involved in a need for perfection. Seeking perfection is a sure way to be displeased. Seeking perfection may also keep you from looking at other things that you may not want to. It is evasive.

Especially do not seek perfection in others. That will make you petulant.

You know that sometimes a detail gets caught in your craw. It needles you. Then you have to ask yourself, "How material to what I desire is this detail? Is it possible that this is a thorn that I hang myself on?"

The question is not whether you are correct in what bothers you. Sometimes you are right! Often you are right. But right or wrong, the question is: Why do you let it bother you so much?

You would not seek perfection unless you thought it was right to do so. And now you are learning not to be so attached to perfection.

At the same time, I do not tell you to lower your standards. I do not tell you to be sloppy or uncaring. I suggest that you include in your standards an amendment that you will not insist upon perfection, in yourself or in others.

Yet, how do you know when to persist and when to let go? If you are an artist, you want to make a great painting. And, yet, even as a great artist, perhaps there is a time when you say you are finished with a painting, satisfied or not.

Pay less attention to the flaws.

Maybe you need to look at those imperfect things that trip you up from a greater distance. Look for the general effect more than for perfect parts.

You are never less in My eyes.

The child brings a painting home from school for his mother. Does the mother look for perfection in the painting? Does she correct it? She sees something more than the painting. And, yet, is not the painting perfect as it is?

Be a mother to yourself.

Do not seek to control that which you cannot.

Get your attention on bigger things. Look up.

When you are involved in a group effort and you find you are still bothered by something that the others are not bothered by, there are two things for you to do: speak and listen. Both are valuable. Collaborate.