Strike for perfection

And I don't mean with everything you do, but with some things.

Now, here's the thing that you should always keep in mind - balance is key. Striking for perfection every single minute of your life is crazy and, well, will probably drive YOU crazy. But not giving a crap about what you do and how you do it is also bad. So how do you balance that?

Well, I had an idea these days after seeing a silly picture on Pinterest with a "cute" dog doing something random, and someone in the comments saying "HE'S TRYING HIS BEST". Now, the last phrase, "he's trying his best", is what matters in this context.

Trying your best is important, and combining that with "striking for perfection" could lead to some really decent results.

Let me explain what I mean better by mentioning, once again, my Dark Souls Scene made using Blender.

I made this after a few months of learning how to use Blender, a 3D Modelling software. It was also my first big project. I started working on it for a competition, and ended up spending a month transforming it into what you can see in the link above.

The thing about that scene is that when I started working on it properly, I had two things in mind - first, I wanted to try my best and make it as good as I could make it despite not knowing much about 3D and second, I wanted the scene to be the best thing in the world.

Now, the fact that I wasn't really good at 3D made my second "goal" quite hard. With the skills I had back then, and even the ones I have now, I would have never been able to create the best thing ever. But, having that goal in mind, and being willing to achieve it by trying my very best, helped me do something that I didn't really do in the past - push the limits of "my very best".

By that I mean that every single time I had an idea for an item that would improve the scene, like the big Zweihander sword, an item I had absolutely no idea how to make, even though every part of my body said "Don't even try it, you can't do it", that goal, striking for perfection, combined with my desire to try my very best, pushed me to actually try to create something, not anything, but the best possible result I could come up with having the skills I had at that moment.

And I applied the same principle for each item in the scene, because, to be honest with you, when I started I had no idea how to do 90% of the things you see there. But I managed to push myself more and more, striking for perfection, knowing I won't achieve it, but trying my very best.

And now I'm doing the same with coding. I can't write perfect code, and maybe I never will. I don't have the best solutions to any coding-related problem I encounter, and my coding skills are quite laughable.

However, striking for perfection, having "becoming the best programmer ever" as my goal, even though I will never be able to achieve it, and yet still trying my best, helps me make more progress than I would make if I'd simply be like "Oh well, I'll just take it easy, no rush, no need to push myself too hard".

So if you're looking for a way to make more progress and to improve at what you do a lot more and a lot faster, learn how to strike for perfection, even if you know you can't achieve it, while still trying your very best. That could easily help you achieve things that you didn't think were possible before.