• We fail and we make mistakes, but that’s what makes this life interesting
I was never the person who spoke with the prowess of wit or the flare for language. When I speak, I can be slow, unsteady and unsure of my next word. And my mouth has never been able to catch up with my light-speed mind. The gift of gab has never been one with me. It has always eluded me.
Somehow, my mind seems to process things way faster than I can say them. Sometimes, it feels as though my tongue is made of clay. And I wish I could say I’m a better listener, but I am not. My ability to listen is even far more atrocious than my speaking skills. You have to be very interesting to have me gripped while speaking to me. Otherwise, you’ll just be talking and I would be on some exotic island in the Far East Pacific, messaging Regina Hall’s legs.
Now let’s first get a few things straight. I am not daft; at least I don’t think I am. And besides Min Jii, most people actually give me far too much credit for being clever. So I am not daft, which means I can form coherent statements that make sense. In fact, on familiar grounds, one would even say I have the oratory gifts of my ancestors. But on unfamiliar grounds, well, refer to the first paragraph up there.
Sometime this week, I was invited over for lunch by my seniors in a field where I am but a novice. Of course, I was anxious as hell. In such situations, you want to talk beautifully, to appear smart without waving a flag about it. You want to impress without seeming to try. You want to be perfect.
Because everyone knows such meetings are not really about lunch. When your seniors invite you for lunch, it’s not because they care about your favourite cuisine or they relish in the joy of your company. No. They want to size you up. See what makes you tick.
Thankfully, I have trained myself well enough to handle such situations. Just a year ago, back on campus, my training would serve me pretty well during the computer science final-year project presentation. It was a brilliant system we — Maxy and I — had come up with.
Only that it did not work. The system was brilliant but just as complicated. The one month universities allocate for projects just wasn’t enough. And building the physical prototype of the system required us to purchase a few pieces of equipment. But since no comrade has money to waste on such trivialities as a coursework project, we decided to simulate the entire system instead.
Now anyone who has read enough books will tell you simulating such a system is way more complicated than building a physical prototype. Our simulation was only functional at 25 per cent by the time we were due for the presentation. And yet we wanted to graduate, so we went to present.
Before a panel of people with many degrees in technology, we admitted that our project was not perfect. And we said it wasn’t perfect at the moment, but we plan to make it so in the future. Because for us, it wasn’t just a final-year project, it was a life-changing technological masterpiece. Yes, we used those words exactly. “Life-changing technological masterpiece.” By the time we were done presenting the 60 per cent (of course, we weren’t going to tell them only 25 per cent worked) of the project that worked, those damn PhDs were in awe.
I don’t know where those project files are right now. But in that presentation, we demonstrated that in a world where there is less and less tolerance for imperfection, we could create something imperfect and get rewarded for it. And that’s the mentality I headed over to that lunch with. I wasn’t going to try and be perfect; I was going to be me, with all my flaws.
As a creative, and as someone who has grown up in a generation that holds such a high standard for perfection, it is a struggle to just exist. To many creatives, art, in whatever shape or form, is the analysis of imperfection. And great art is created out of chaos.
Now it doesn’t matter how many ‘correctness’ hashtags we tweet out, the truth is we are imperfect beings doing imperfect things. And that is okay. We fail, we make mistakes, and we don’t always get it right, but that’s what makes this life interesting. Because we are always trying to do better, not be perfect, but do better. That is my motive as I go through life; whatever I put my hands on, I am just trying to do better than I did before.
You should try it, too.