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Audio Journal: The Beauty of Imperfection · The Daily Writer

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: One of the great ironies of being a writer or an artist in the year 2020 is that we have the opportunity to endlessly update and perfect our work.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you put a book up on Amazon KDP, Kindle Digital Publishing, and you self-publish that, you can upload the book, and if you see a mistake in it, you can go back and correct that mistake an infinite number of times.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a musician, you can upload something to YouTube, and if you find a mistake in it, then you can go back and you can upload another version of it.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a wonderful opportunity that we have to make our work excellent, but it's also a major curse because we can so easily get obsessed with releasing a perfect version of whatever it is that we're creating.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I find so interesting is that, you know, most of the greatest works in of art in history have some kind of imperfection in them.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I was thinking back through the imperfections just off the top of my head of great works of art that I really love.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, for example, my favorite statue of all time probably is Michelangelo's David, which is of course a world famous statue.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's about 16 feet tall, it's huge.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at the size of David's hands, they're actually not anatomically correct.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: His hands are actually a little bit oversized, it doesn't really make any sense.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: But yet it's still considered uh one of history's greatest works of art.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at a painting by Van Gogh up close, or a painting by Monet, or really any painter for that matter, you'll see that there's imperfections in the brush strokes.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: They're not all evenly spaced.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um sometimes there's little flecks of paint in different places that don't belong there.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's imperfect.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's really fun.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I live in St.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Louis, and at times I go to the St.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Louis Art Museum, and there have been paintings by Monet and Van Gogh there, and it's it's really cool to stand right in front of these paintings and you begin to see these little imperfections in them.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's really fascinating.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: If I think about something like music, you know, most of the great music of all time has little imperfections in it.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: For example, of course, you know who the Beatles are.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows the Beatles.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've always found it fascinating that there are these little imperfections musically in a lot of the Beatles' recordings.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, probably some of that is due to their limitations of technology at the time, but I also think they were these were just great artists who recorded and they didn't obsess over things for years, and they just recorded and moved on.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: For example, if you listen to their song Drive My Car, you know it goes, baby, you can drive my car.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not singing the notes right, but if you know that song, if you listen to the last measure of the bridge, so there's a guitar solo, then there's the bridge, the very last snare drum hit, well, actually it's the second to the last snare drum hit of the bridge, right before they go into the course for kind of the last time, the snare drum on beat three, it hits just a hair a little bit too late.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been aware of that for decades because I've loved the Beatles my whole life.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: I've always thought it was interesting that they didn't go back and correct that.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: The snare drum hits just a slight bit too late.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at uh the movies, for example, if you like The Godfather, so The Godfather is one of my favorite movies of all time, there's an interesting imperfection.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's there's multiple imperfections in The Godfather as far as you know cuts and overdubs and stuff like that.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: But one that kind of sticks out is there's a scene in the last third of the movie or so where Michael Corleone goes to Las Vegas and he's confronting this guy named Mo Green, who owns a casino out there.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Corleone family wants to buy him out, and Mo Green's upset about this because he doesn't want to sell to the Corleone family.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And there's this little section where Mo Green, the tall guy with the glasses, he's talking and he says, I talked to Barzini.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Barzini is uh one of the crime bosses back in New York City.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I talked to Barzini.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that is clearly an overdub.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that it sounds a little different than the dialogue around it, and it's clear that it doesn't really fit in.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: But nobody cares because it's such a great movie.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I look at my own tendency to be a perfectionist, and maybe you do as well, and I think, why do we get so obsessed about this?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, those imperfections, they lend a humanity to our creative work.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: They lend soul to it, they lend personality to it.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we have all these ways to make our work perfect nowadays, but it really, at some point, the perfection just detracts from it.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: It detracts from the humanity, from the heart and soul of what we do.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to challenge, I want to challenge you to not be obsessed with perfection.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we should make things as excellent as we can, and we should fix all the typos that we can see.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, God is the only one who's perfect.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: It really is true.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And our best work on our best days is only a shadow reflection of the perfection that that God has.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not to over-spiritualize anything, but I really do think that's true.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: So let's create, let's be excellent, and then let's put it out there and then let's move on to the next thing.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe who knows?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe one day people will admire some of our pieces like they admire some other great works in history.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: If we're fortunate and if we create at a really high level.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, it's something we can always shoot for and hope for, right?
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, that's it for this episode.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: I will see you in the next one.