Permanently Insufficient, and Proud of It
We don’t have a lot of room to proudly claim our birthright as imperfect beings.
Across public figures, popular media, and cultural narratives, I don’t know that I can name many aspirational role models who show us what it looks like to actually embrace and celebrate our human imperfections. (Maybe Josh Sundquist comes to mind.) But I want to assert—in a very real, non-platitude way—that being flawed is a feature, not a flaw.
But how the culture around us responds to those flaws has a lot of sway in how we feel about ourselves.
As a born and bred U.S. American, I can confidently say that these are some of my culture’s most cherished values—values so omnipresent, they feel like universal givens:
Hard work & productivity
Permanence
Responsibility
Abundance
Heroism
Independence
Mastery & accomplishment
Efficiency
Correctness
Grit
These can all be wonderful values to hold, but we hardly stop to consider that they might be optional. Imagine that we hadn’t inherited our values but were rather, at birth, handed a comprehensive menu of values from which to design the trajectory of our moral life. Would we have picked the same slate?
Perhaps we might have selected or subbed in some of these anti-perfectionist options:
Comfort with uncertainty
Beginnerism (a bias toward and aptitude for being a beginner at things)
Apology and repair
Interdependence & interpersonal vulnerability
Psychological humility (not to be mistaken for downplaying strengths and avoidance of praise)
Benefit-of-the-doubtism
Acknowledgement of limitations
Owning mistakes and recovering graciously
Messy, colorful, alive, and slightly uncomfortable—a decent metaphor for being an imperfect person.
Photo by Mohit Suthar via Pexels.com
Let’s take a look at Correctness vs. Owning Mistakes. We can organize our lives around never making a mistake or being wrong (an often anxious position, I find). Or we can embrace that we’re mistake-making creatures and practice getting good at humility, apology, and repair. Personally, I find myself powerfully endeared to people who make mistakes, address them with humility and humor, and move on. These are the people I want to befriend and spend time with.
On top of that, living systems don’t grow without a healthy amount of stress. It’s appealing to imagine relationships without any conflict or rupture. But like bones and trees, the regrowth that happens after strain makes the thing stronger than it was before. When our relationships move through (safe, reasonable) conflict and into repair, we’re closer and healthier than if we’d never had conflict at all.
There's a lot to be proud of—to treasure—about being imperfect.
Now imagine something else with me:
Imagine a culture that genuinely and enthusiastically celebrates imperfection.
We might throw parties for people who are struggling, and toast folks who make difficult apologies.
Kids could earn merit badges for Changing My Mind About Something Important and Admitting I Was Wrong.
We’d erect a Museum of Unfinished Projects and throw Beginner Festivals, where adults could try out new skills publicly and messily.
We would unironically crown a Failure Laureate for the year—someone who tried something big, even though they couldn’t pull it off.
Maybe we can’t build that culture exactly, but I like to imagine how much we’d grow in wisdom, in innovation, in gentleness. How unanxious we’d be. Maybe we can start to build it in ourselves.
© 2025–2026 Summer Hopkins Myers | Already Good
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