The Speed of Perfection
Cutting Away At An Eternal Endless Gap
"Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away" Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Perfection and the speed of light
You keep cutting away at an endless eternal gap,
at an aching pace, it never goes away
It is a starship stretching ever closer towards lightspeed
but never reaching an eternal vanishing point
The blessed imagine, see, and accept what they can cut
towards personal imperfect mastery
racing towards the unattainable speed of perfection
"Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away" Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery is famous for two things in my mind: flying and for writing “The Little Prince”. His words about perfection struck home.
Perfection.
It is an ideal which means different things to each of us. And everyone is chasing it.
It's the laser light toy people use to play with their pet cats. Cats chase the light. We do the same with perfection, and hopefully we never quite catch it. May our chase never end.
Speaking of never catching laser lights, I am reminded about the physics of traveling at the speed of light. We can move faster and faster but it gets harder with each increment. You have to use increasing amounts of effort to go just a bit further.
Time slows down, your mass changes and you never quite hit the mark. You keep cutting away at the gap between less than light-speed and advance at an aching pace. The gap never goes away.
Achieving perfection is a starship stretching ever closer towards lightspeed but never reaching it.
The first cuts, edits and changes result in massive changes. You get enormous rates of changes off the low base of a starting point. At some point you hit a limit.
I had a mentor who taught me about the markets as simple but not easy. He stripped away a lot of details and indicators used by others - guided by a perspective about what works without the frills.
Years later, I am still cutting, editing, optimizing and edging my way towards perfection. I’m not quite there and I doubt day will ever arrive but I do know I’m a lot further from my starting point.
We look for time savers, life hacks, or for “techniques” as we chase the laser light or lightspeed.
Most start out with a sliver of one corner of the world to start life in. The fortunate have the entire world at their feet. Everyone has only so many hours on Earth, and only so much room for the world in their lives. Over time, we make choices about how to live and who we have in our lives.
The truly blessed among us can imagine, see and expand what they can cut. Bruce Lee, Picasso and Steve Jobs, and anyone with a base of “classical” training, would go on to become masters. They would all cut, iterate and innovate towards personal imperfect mastery.
May we all keep taking away and never quite touch "perfection".