Why Good Enough is Better Than Perfect: How Not To Let Perfectionism Hold Back Your Growth
4 psycholigical shifts to free you from perfectionism.
Striving for perfection can seem like a good thing on the surface, but it can be the greatest undoing of your creative pursuit.
Claude Monet was one of the most well-known painters of his time, painting nearly 2000 works over the course of nearly 70 years.
Today, lots of people can easily recognize his paintings, even if they don’t know much about art.
In 1908, Monet was set to open an exhibition of his now famous Water Lilies series in Paris. Before the show could open, he did something shocking — he took a knife and slashed fifteen of his own paintings, so they couldn’t be shown to the public.
It wasn’t the first (or last) time Monet destroyed his work. It’s believed that he destroyed nearly 500 of his paintings the same way.
The reason? Monet felt they were not up to his standard.
A friend of Monet and former French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau, said the master painter “destroyed canvases in his quest for perfection.”
Here’s what Monet said after slashing 15 paintings before an exhibition: