The Eighth Deadly Sin

I spend a lot of time with women. Most of my Mah Jongg students are women (although men are catching on to than Mah Jongg is fun.) In a given month I probably spend nine hours with over 450 different women and that is only counting students, not friends. One trait I encounter in almost every class is at least one student who I can identify as a perfectionist. I guess I should call them an aspiring perfectionist (AP), because no one is perfect.

First I have to say I am really proud of these AP’s because they are attempting to learn something new in a group setting. That is terrifically hard on someone trying to achieve perfection. When you learn something new you are vulnerable, before you are proficient.

To learn requires failing, because you learn best from your mistakes.

Perfectionists often quit before they fail. Quiting is not seen as big a failure by them. Not being great at something quickly is seen as failure, and it should not be. To be good, not even great, at Mah Jongg takes practice. Being great does not ever promise perfection. No one is perfect at Mah Jongg, that is what makes it an interesting game.

Teaching perfectionists takes a huge amount of patience on my part. These people want to know the one right answer quickly. What hand should they play? What tiles should they pass? What hand can they change to since ONE of the tiles they needed has been discarded.

Trying to teach patience to perfectionists is my most practiced skill. At this point I should become some Buddhist monk.

What I really wish is that people could learn to give up on perfectionism. I see very little benefit in being one and so much heart ache in trying to achieve the unachievable.

Spending time to go from being 50% good at something to 70% is probably good enough to be happy. But to go from being 98% good at something to 100% is never going to happen and you will make yourself miserable over 2%. Perfectionism should be considered the eighth deadly sin. It is probably equal to sloth, which at least has a cute animal named after it.