I perceive content creation through a distinctive lens. One that focuses on learning rather than teaching.
My previous essay, A Few Thoughts on Systems, has a grammatical error. See, I carry a trivial desire to share that mistake in this mini-essay. However, by not mentioning it, I spare my readers the serendipity of finding it themselves, so there’s that.
Now, like with all unforeseen encounters in writing, I have only caught the flaw once I hit publish. At first, fighting the cringe was hard. I thought, “I’ve written thousands of articles already – I shouldn’t have made a mistake.” But I discovered this thinking is a display of arrogance disguised as perfectionism.
In Bertrand Russel’s archetypes of unhappy people from his book The Conquest of Happiness, he provides an archetype that accurately mirrors the delusion of perfectionism: the sinner. Here’s how I defined the archetype in one of my Obsidian vaults (think of vaults as workspaces in Notion):
“1. The Sinner. This is someone whose inculcated ethics/moral code and actions/intrinsic nature are impossible to reconcile, hence is stuck in an unending process of finding peace.”
This elucidation gives us a clear answer, but Russel’s archetype could be further generalized. In a newsletter edition that I published precisely 489 days ago, I synthesized the idea of Bertrand Russel as follows:
“The sinner, when observed more closely, can be identified as an archetype for anyone who wishes to achieve perfection. This person can be outside the religious lens but within the constricts of any desire for immaculacy.”
While expounding on the idea, I provided a more specific example of the archetype:
“…the tyrannical parent who wishes to impose upon his children to nullify all mistakes in learning.”
The truth is anyone could spend their lifetime developing a skill and yet still commit mistakes despite their investment of time. Errors are not a matter of incompetence but of human quality. We are not unskilled – we are mortals who sometimes mess up. Things don’t always go our way.
And so, as of writing, I rest in the comfort of knowing my works are not the sum of perfection but rather that of a continuous and mistake-rich learning process.
I hope you think the same way about your mistakes, too.