Finding Beauty In Imperfection

I have a friend who loves Japanese food. In my neighborhood, there’s a Japanese restaurant that he’s obsessed with and he loves their food.

In fact, he loves their food so much and visits the restaurant so often that the entire staff pretty much knows who he is.

He even met a famous Japanese tea master at the restaurant and was invited to attend one of his tea ceremonies.

What’s a tea ceremony you might be wondering?

It’s a special ritual where tea masters prepare and serve the green tea known as Matcha.

However, it’s not as simple as I made it sound. For the tea masters, there’s a whole choreography they have to perfect and it requires a lot of discipline.

When my friend told me about all this, I asked him what the significance of the ceremony is.

To summarize what he told me:

The significance has to do with the concept of “Wabi-Sabi.”

Wabi-Sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection and accepting the natural cycle of life and death.

Finding beauty in imperfection, is something that, I think we can both agree on, a lot of people struggle with. But once we find it, our lives become so much easier.

We want things to be perfect. But as wishful thinking as it is, things won’t always turn out that way. Achieving perfection, although it does make us work harder in some cases, also holds us back too.

In fact, it’s one of the causes of procrastination.

Master marketer, Justin Goff, admits to this in an email he sent to his list yesterday. He fell two weeks behind on a huge project because he wanted it to be perfect.

It happens to me too when I need to write.

Our solution?

Start with a small task.

In the case of writing emails, write one sentence. Then continue doing small tasks until you get into the groove and snowball through.

But you still have to make sure you’re writing good emails though, which you can learn by reading "How to Become an Email Titan."