Perfectionist?

I'm sure that you along with me I grew up with the old adage, "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well". I know my parents quoted that to me very often, and I grew up believing it. My parents didn't lie. Then many years later at Jeanie's graduation from college, the commencement speaker gave a talk part of which has stayed with me until this time. How unlikely is that for a usually long and boring speech? In fact, I was so impressed that a I sent away for the talk. The part that I remember and that made me begin rethinking my initial view was when he said: "Not everything you do should require your best effort", and then he began elaborating as to why. His reasoning made a lot of sense to me. He said that we need to prioritize by importance what should require our best efforts and what should not. Not everything that is worth putting forth our best efforts. But how do we differentiate between the two? Those who have to do everything perfectly suffer from a lot of anxiety and stress which is common among those "perfectionists". They are not usually happy people.

This month our Relief Society and Young Women undertook a humanitarian project making T-shirt dresses for little girls in Africa. The sisters and girls were excited and totally supportive of this project. They donated enough T-shirts and fabric to make a total of eighty-two dresses. We were unable to finish all the dresses in one night of sewing, so the sisters took the rest home. Because I was in charge of this project, all the dresses were returned to me. Most of the sisters did a beautiful job sewing the dresses, but there were some which obviously had been done very sloppily without much care. That really bothered me, because one of those sewers bragged about she had been sewing since she was fourteen and was now even selling some of her work on line. It seemed obvious to me that she didn't feel the dresses for these destitute children were of enough importance to give them her best efforts. In fact, I heard her say, "The children will be so grateful just to have a new dress that they won't really care if the sewing isn't perfect". Her work didn't even come close to perfect.

As I sat ripping out the work of that sister and remaking those ten dresses I thought to myself, "Am I such a perfectionist that I need these dresses to be at least as well made as those I would make for my own family? Maybe this sister is right. The children won't really care. I should just appreciate the fact that she was willing to take dresses home to finish. Is it just the perfectionist in that makes me sit here hour after hour redoing all of her work? I am aware that I have always been one of those (a perfectionist) but have since that graduation talk tried to evaluate how much time and effort a task is worth giving. And I also realize that as I get older I tend to slip backwards in my effort to make rational decisions. I enjoy having a neat, clean, organized home because now without children in the home, I can. But that really isn't that important when I consider how easy it can become an obsession in that there are days that I am too tired to do the work and stress about letting it go. That is just one example.

In my own mind this project was important enough to me to give it my best efforts. And I did. But I also had to redo those that were really bad. Was this something that was worth doing, but not worth the extra time and effort I put into it. Or am I just a hopeless obsessive perfectionist?