Okay, let me start off with a terrible confession: I was a teenage curve buster.
Yep, for much of my academic career, I was that geeky, brown-nosing teacher’s pet who got 100 on every test. Well, not every test, but most of them.
What can I say, I am a good test taker. I have a mind that retains useless facts, and I like to pit my mind against the mind of the test maker– their tests were always a window into their subconscious, and it was like deciphering a code. And then there was the statistical angle of determining the probability of the right answer.
(Problem was, my test-taking ability led to my always testing higher than my actual ability, and this eventually put me in math classes where I was in over my head and could not function. I still passed the tests of course, but I never learned anything.)
When I was in the sixth grade, my teacher put up a bulletin board with a pyramid, and it had the names of every kid in the class, and your position in the pyramid reflected your relative grade point average. I was always on the top, and Susie Myers was always #2. Poor kid. Well, I suppose she spent her life trying harder.
While I was certainly thrilled to be the top student and I always took some satisfaction at my lengthy run of perfect scores, I am having trouble seeing the purpose of it now. When I do anything creative, the one thing that is hardest for me is not the creating or the executing. It is the knowledge that I will not get a perfect score, and this feels terribly wrong.
Deep in my elementary school lizard brain is a fervent belief that if I just study really hard and memorize all the rules and triple check everything, that I will get a perfect score, but in publishing a book, what would that mean? All 5 star reviews on amazon? (well . . . I DO have that, more or less) Or every human being on the planet buying it? And what about the typos that relentlessly crop up with each new edition?
The whole idea of perfection, to me anyway, now represents a reward for obedience, not any kind of useful training in dealing with real life. For me, perfect scores were a measure of how eager I was for approval from authority figures. The very idea of a perfect score makes real life seem second rate, and I take exception to that now.
What we really mean by perfection is “immune from painful criticism by anyone.” And that idea, as a goal in life, is somewhat less than perfect, don’t you think?
© Justin Locke
Justin Locke is an entertaining speaker. Call him at 781-330-8143 to discuss having him appear at your next event.
