You can always find flaws if you look hard enough

The perfectionist’s trap

A while back, I had lunch with a friend who had just launched his first online course. He was nervous about how it would be received. “I know it’s not perfect,” he confessed, stabbing his fork into a salad. “The slides are a bit rough, and the audio dips in one or two places. I keep thinking people are going to tear it apart.”

A week later, I looked through his course. Yes, the slides could have been sleeker, and yes, the audio wobbled once or twice. But the content was excellent, practical, well-structured, and genuinely helpful. He had poured himself into it. The flaws were real, but they didn’t cancel out the value. In fact, most students barely noticed.

What they saw was someone brave enough to teach.

That’s the trouble with flaws: they’re everywhere. And if you want to find them, you will.

I’ve lived in that trap myself. Whenever I write, my eyes instinctively drift to the imperfections: the awkward phrasing, the sentence that could be smoother, the idea that isn’t fully formed.

Sometimes I will spend an hour adjusting one paragraph, convinced it’s the hinge on which the whole essay swings. Later, I will reread the draft and laugh; nobody would have noticed what kept me up at night.

It reminds me of a line from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.”

She’s right. Perfectionism promises safety but delivers paralysis.

Think about it: flaws are like cracks on a wall. Hold a magnifying glass close enough, and the cracks become all you see. Pull back, and the cracks fade into the texture of the whole. The problem isn’t always the crack; it’s the distance at which you’re looking.

I once had a teacher who said, “The longer you stare at a face in the mirror, the stranger it looks.”

He meant it literally. Study any face long enough, your own or someone else’s, and you’ll notice every asymmetry, every blemish. But step back, and the same face is simply human, radiant in its normal imperfection.

There’s a formula many of us live by, even without realising it:

If I look long enough, I’ll prove this isn’t good enough.
If I analyse my work closely enough, I’ll find its weakness.
If I scrutinise myself harshly enough, I’ll confirm my inadequacy.
If I examine others critically enough, I’ll justify my distance.

It’s a clever formula because it guarantees its own result. The flaw is always there, waiting.

But there’s another formula worth trying:

If I look long enough, I will find humanity in the flaws.

The crack in the vase proves it has been used.

The scratch on the guitar tells of nights around a campfire.

The trembling voice in the speech reveals the courage it took to speak at all.

As Leonard Cohen sang: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

A friend once told me, after I apologised for a poorly timed joke, “I don’t need you to be perfect, I need you to be real.” That sentence disarmed me. It reminded me that flaws aren’t barriers to connection; often, they are the very bridges that connect us. We trust people who are honest enough to be imperfect.

Another time, I spoke with a colleague who was paralysed about launching her photography website. “It’s not professional enough,” she said. “What if people criticise it?” I told her, gently, “They will.

Someone will always find a flaw. But if you don’t launch it, you’ll be the loudest critic of all.” She launched it the following week. The site still has rough edges, but it’s alive, and alive things grow.

The danger of obsessive flaw-finding is that it becomes endless rehearsal (there’s that word again). We keep editing, fixing, polishing, until the opportunity slips away. We convince ourselves we’re improving, but often we’re just delaying.

Perfectionism disguises itself as care, but really it’s fear in a suit.

So here I am, writing these lines. If I read them closely enough, I will undoubtedly find flaws: a sentence too long, an idea underdeveloped, a clumsy metaphor. If I dwell on them, I could easily decide this piece isn’t worth sharing.

But I choose differently. I accept that the flaws are not disqualifiers but companions. They prove that I’m writing, that I’m risking, that I’m alive.

You can always find flaws if you look hard enough. However, you can also find courage, humanity, and beauty if you choose to look for them instead.

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