Become More Human and Relatable

It is week thirty-three in our fifty week challenge, and we were given a vey specific prompt. On a piece of black paper, create a border then write a capital letter in the middle of the border, embellish as desired. HHmmm? I had to think about that one. Specifics are good, and yet this felt like a sort of do-over from several weeks back. So how to make this feel fresh for me and how to find an idea that makes we want to work.

Overnight I thought about the prompt, and woke up with ‘black paper, black paper, black paper’ running through my head. I dug through my papers and found a piece of Gel Printed paper I made several weeks ago, and pulled out get pens. I then wrote words to fill in and create a border. I wrote the same thing nine times in five different colors. I wrote the capital letter, things got a title muddled so I decided to let my perfectionist tendencies go and post it.

Sometimes we are given tasks that do not excite us, yet we have to do them anyway. Just do the work, your way, meet the requirements and get it done. Of course we want to always produce great work, no matter what we are doing. And wouldn’t it be fabulous if everything we did was perfect, or would it? Perfection leads us to believe that we are infallible, solid in what we know, and have no need to stretch. Doing things that do not make us jump up and down with excitement forces us to shift, learn, and challenge ourselves. NOT being perfect or receiving the perfect work instructions makes us think, finagle and grow beyond our perfect little box. And when we are challenged, we learn, we expand our abilities and may actually end up doing something we didn’t know we could do.

Next time you are asked to do something that feels or appears to be just like something you’ve already done, stop. Give it a think and see how you can make the same old thing feel fresh and new even if that challenges your ability to be perfect. When we give up our perfection we have the ability to be even better than perfect, we become more human and relatable.