The Gift of Imperfect Action
Crushing the butterfly, making a mess, and learning by doing.
The other day I had a brief exchange with the writer/podcaster
in the comments section of her Substack. Her post had been about professional priorities and tradeoffs, and I’d just been writing about the projects we can’t seem to get to and grief, so I commented about the loss that comes along with these choices. Her reply was so relevant to what I’ve been thinking about the past few weeks, I thought I’d share. She said:Recently I’ve been trying to get my head around a bigger truth about life, which is that there isn’t a way of doing things that will work out perfectly. Imperfect is the best we can do in any area of our lives, and the wisdom that we acquire as we get older, I think, is mostly about letting things go.
The comment reminded me of a metaphor I’ve always liked from Ann Patchett’s short writing memoir The Getaway Car about her experience of writing a book.
Before she starts writing it, her idea is like a butterfly, “a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight is the single perfect joy in my life.”
But then she has to start actually writing the thing. And taking action - the putting of pen to paper - changes everything. She goes on:
I reach into the air and pluck the butterfly up. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down on my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page.
Just to make sure the job is done, I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light and movement—is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead.
That’s the book.
This is roughly the experience I’ve had as I’ve tried to finalize the syllabus for my course on career decision making.
I want it to be perfect. The structure to be logical, but also elegant and surprising. The readings diverse, implicitly linked, and progressively insightful. The outcomes, life-changing.
And yet.
And yet, I know that the more time I spend on trying to make the syllabus “perfect,” the less time I’ll spend on actually making it. That in order for it to be in the world where others can see it and respond to it, where it can potentially have any impact at all, it first simply has to exist.
A mantra for wading through the agony of first steps: it has to make a mess before it can make sense.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to continually learn how many things in life are like riding a bicycle. Just not in the “once you’ve learned you’ll never forget” sense, but in the “you have to be moving to learn” sense. Don’t learn to do, do to learn. Action creates insight. I’ve learned more about how to write by simply sitting down and typing out these newsletters over the past year than I ever have by reading about how to write.
It’s true, I think, of many of the things we do. As Herminia Ibarra says in her book Working Identity, “No amount of self-reflection can substitute for the direct experience we need to evaluate alternatives according to criteria that change as we do.”
That’s been an odd thing to experience in itself, the criteria that change as we do. Desires change, goals change. Projects/ideas that used to be most compelling to me - but that I didn’t get to for some reason - have faded away as things have shifted and reshaped in my life.
But some of them have hung on in the back of my imagination too. I hope I can someday mush those ideas onto a page for you to consider, dear reader, imperfect as I’m sure they will be.
Apply this thinking:
In what area of your work/life might you reveal new learning and insight by taking action, rather than continuing to think and reflect?
p.s. Class starts this afternoon at 1pm CT, wish us a lucky passage.