Thomas Curran
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I've lived in countless different homes.
I can't set root in communities or build a long and lasting friendship group because my life has just been essentially one long period of flux.
So, yes, it looks like success, but it doesn't feel like success.
And when I look and reflect on this journey and how difficult it's been and the sacrifices I've had to make, I sometimes question whether I might have been better off back in my working class community with a job that gives me some sense of purpose, with a family and a house and a community.
No, I don't think we get to speak for Steve Jobs at all.
If somebody carries perfectionism around with them and they're really successful and they, yes, they go through all of the things that I've experienced and for them it's worth it, then who am I to tell them that that isn't the case?
from what I understand about the work that I've done and my own experiences, is that perfectionism carries a really heavy cost and that actually there's plenty of evidence that we can be just as successful, if not more successful, and not carrying around the emotional baggage that we carry around with perfectionism.
I think Margaret Atwood is a great example of someone who can combine a desire, a joy, a real sense of purpose and vocation in what she does, i.e.
And being able to do that in a way that doesn't carry with it this kind of constant self-worry and self-doubt about it being perfect or exceptional.
And really, perfectionism is the thief of creativity in many ways.
It stops us from putting things out there when they're not quite right because we worry about how that's going to be received.
And I can tell you that firsthand from having written a book.
My editor, I think, was ready to throttle me at the end of the process because I was still tinkering, iterating right to the end.
And it was so intensely difficult to get this one out.
And Atwood has almost the opposite perspective