Except in you. That contrast creates constant friction.
When you press play on Spotify, you don’t listen to a friend who’s half-decent at playing the guitar. You listen to Ed Sheeran, AC/DC, and Linkin Park. People who’ve been practicing for 20, 30, 50 years. You’re listening to the best rendition of their best songs, digitally mastered and optimized for your already-high-class sound system or extremely advanced earbuds.
On Youtube, you no longer see many 11-year-olds fiddling with 360p cameras to get out a blurry video. You see channels run by entire production teams on which, sometimes, a single video might have as high a budget as an entire season of a lesser known TV show.
Speaking of which, from Netflix to Amazon to Disney Plus: It’s all the crème de la crème. The most iconic movies and TV shows, curated from almost 100 years of television history. And even their self-produced duds all have one thing in common: They look freakin’ amazing. The writing might be bad, but the costumes, sets, and visual effects? Phew.
Dare to go outside, and you’ll be met with perfect ads of perfect abs—the sexiest woman alive presenting an impeccably crafted watch or a smiling Olympic gold medalist driving off in a car that was made by the same people who gave James Bond his latest Aston Martin.
Perfection is no longer the privilege of the elite. Tickets to a world-class orchestra no longer cost the world, and even if they do to you, you can listen to one on Youtube for free!
On the one hand, that’s a good thing. It’s important that everyone can access great art. We all deserve elevation, inspiration, and to see great performers at work. But in a way, it’s also “a pity that technology has brought so many masterful performances into our homes,” George Leonard writes in his book Mastery. If everything we encounter is the result of decades of slow, incremental perfection, how can we possibly compare? We can’t, and we shouldn’t. Mustn’t, really. If we do, chances are, we’ll never bother making an effort.
“Mastery is not about perfection,” George writes. “It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.” Trying and failing. Trying and failing. That’s all there is for anyone, really—even the masters. They, too, were never guaranteed to be bestselling authors or platinum-certified musicians. But even when they went outside and everything already seemed to be too good to be true, they continued anyway.
Enjoy perfection in small doses, but remember no matter how much of it there is, it’ll never be the norm. You’re not perfect, and neither is anyone else. It’s only through our collaborative efforts that we can reach great heights over centuries. We’re lucky to live at a time when we can witness so many of these heights on an everyday basis, but the most important thing is to keep climbing.