Stanley Bronstein is an attorney and a CPA who, at forty-nine, changed how he ate and started walking, and who spent the eighteen years after that turning what he learned into a system he calls the Way of Excellence. In a conversation about that system he described himself, before any of it started, as a 367 pound perfectionist. The phrase is worth sitting with. His conclusion was that perfection is not a goal at all. Nobody has ever reached it, nobody is going to, so make good enough the floor and spend the rest of a life improving from there.
Most people hear that as permission to lower a standard. It is closer to the opposite, and the reason is buried in the word.
English still carries the older meaning of perfect in an odd place. Grammar. The perfect tense, as in “I have walked,” does not describe a flawless action. It describes a completed one. That usage is a survival from the Latin. Perfectus is the past participle of perficere, which is per and facere, to make through, to carry to the finish. For most of its life the word meant finished. As best I can trace it, the drift toward flawless happened gradually in English, and it happened quietly enough that almost nobody noticed the standard had changed underneath them.
The Greek behind the same idea is teleios, from telos, meaning end, aim, the thing a thing is for. Teleios describes something that has arrived at what it was made for. Fruit that has ripened. An animal grown to full size. A plan carried all the way through rather than abandoned at the halfway point.
Aristotle built an entire ethics on the neighboring word. Arete, usually translated excellence or virtue, described a thing doing well the specific thing it exists to do. A sharp knife has arete. A horse that runs has arete. His argument was that the good of any being is tied to its function, and that a human life goes well when the capacities a human actually has are being used rather than left in the drawer. There is no scoring against an imagined flawless version of yourself anywhere in that framework. There is only the question of whether the thing is functioning as what it is.
I want to press on this, because it would be easy to accept the etymology, feel briefly relieved, and change nothing.
Here is the objection. Constant and never-ending improvement sounds a great deal like perfectionism wearing a friendlier coat. If the standard is always a little further out, the treadmill runs the same either way, and calling it excellence changes the label rather than the experience. That objection is fair, and a lot of self-improvement material does exactly what it accuses.
Where it breaks is the reference point. Perfectionism measures you against a version of yourself that does not exist and never has. That standard is unfalsifiable, so the verdict never improves no matter what you do. Completeness measures you against parts of yourself that are demonstrably absent, and absence is checkable. You can name the thing that is missing. You can go get it. And the floor matters here more than the ceiling does, because a floor is something a person can stand on. Perfection offered no floor at all.
So the useful question is not what is wrong with me. It is which parts of me are not in the room.
That question tends to produce specific answers rather than vague ones. The mind that has been fed steadily for thirty years while the body was treated as transportation. The body that has been optimized carefully while nothing has been asked of the inner life in a decade. The grief from an early loss that never got processed and has been running the operation quietly ever since. The friendships that got postponed during a demanding stretch that ended six years ago. None of that is a defect. Each one is a piece that has not been brought back in yet.
Completeness has the advantage of being measurable in a way that flawlessness never was. You can tell when you are only partly present in your own life, and the body usually reports it before the mind will admit it. Fatigue that sleep does not touch. A restlessness in the evening that no amount of scrolling resolves. The particular flatness of doing everything correctly and feeling nothing about any of it. Those readings get filed as failures of discipline, which is almost always the wrong diagnosis. They are closer to what a system reports when it is running on only some of its parts.
There is one more consequence, and it is the one I keep contemplating. If the standard is completeness, then it describes a direction rather than a threshold. There is no line to cross. There is always another part of yourself sitting outside the room, and there is always the possibility of going out and getting it. That is the only version of the standard a person could actually accept without eventually giving up on it.
It also removes the moral weight. Under perfectionism, every gap is evidence of a character problem. Under completeness, a gap is information about where you have not been spending your attention. A man who has not walked in ten years is not a worse person than one who walks daily. He has a capacity sitting unused, and capacities that sit unused do not stay neutral. They atrophy, and their atrophy quietly narrows what feels possible, until a person mistakes the narrowed version for their actual size.
What would change in your week if the standard were wholeness rather than flawlessness? Sit with that before answering, because the honest answer probably involves something specific you have been calling a weakness for years.
I invite you to notice, over the next few days, where in your life you are only partly present, without any obligation to fix it. Just notice which part of you is standing outside, and consider what it might mean to open the door.
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© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen