Rock ‘N’ Roll Ain’t About Being Perfect

Transcript

Let’s talk a little bit about that quote from a Jack Black movie School of Rock.

“Rock N Roll Ain’t About Being Perfect.” I like to think about this quote because it seems to apply to so many things in life.

Sometimes we have a tendency to be perfectionists, or the broader term…it’s not so common this word in English but the broader term is autoexigent.

That is self demanding. We have this self-demandingness and we don’t want to do things unless we’re sure they’ll turn out okay.

Many years ago I used to go out to nightclubs with my friends and we would know that if we go and talk to women, try to be cool or try to impress them or whatever this is. Try and take them home or try and get into a relationship with them. Just meet some new and interesting people, whatever it was.

We always knew that…or we learned with time it was never gonna be perfect. It was never going to be that Disney Rom Com situation of what meeting someone looks like on the big screen.

It’s gonna be a little rough, there’s gonna be moments when you’re not sure what’s going to happen.

And my buddy would say to me “How’d it go over there?”

And I’d say “Smooth, smooth as gravel”. It was a little rough but things work out in the end.

That’s the way things are in life, things aren’t always perfect like you imagine. In fact things are never perfect, perfect is this abstraction far removed from reality.

Things are never perfect but things are always as they are. And that’s the reality of the situation.

We put this pressure on ourselves to try and live up to this abstraction or idea of excellence. I do have this autoexigent tendency.

I remember when I was in the office I came in for my quarterly review with the team leader. This was about 7 years ago. And he said “Kurt what do you think of these results?”

I said “I don’t know, I could have done better.”

And the team leaders like “Well, I think they’re excellent.”

We put so much pressure on ourselves to be better because we want to improve ourselves. A lot of time we want to reduce the pain and suffering in the world. We don’t want to hurt people. We don’t want to be in awkward situations.

These things are going to happen. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. We can be grateful for the mistakes we made in the past. We learn from our mistakes and we do become better from it.

I think I’ve told this story before. Maybe I told it on the anxiety mastery video on the Paradise Paradox channel.

The story of the impatient monk. This monk came to sit with us during meditation in the temple. An for whatever reason was being ordained for a year or more but he still hasn’t mastered meditation. Or hes still not very far down the path of meditation.

And he came down to sit with us. My monk friend lit the and we sat for 30 minutes. The impatient monk through the whole time was just fidgeting. Playing on his knees tapping out a rythm, even picking up his phone and checking Facebook. But to his credit he sat there for 30 minutes.

Afterwards I asked my monk friend what do you think about that? Our impatient monk friend here?

And he said “I think it’s wonderful”. He might not have done it perfect alright, but he did it.

He did what he came to do, he sat down for those 30-35 minutes.

Rock and roll isn’t about being perfect. You know when you walk into karaoke there will be someone who sings technically correctly. But it doesn’t excite the crowd it doesn’t get them out of their seats dancing and cheering.

Even though this person is a very good singer. Later on in the night when somebody has had six or seven drinks and they get up on the mic and they sing their little heart out. Half the notes are wrong but it doesn’t matter cause they have the passion.

What if we live our lives like that? What if we could put that kind of passion into every day? People wouldn’t mind so much about our mistakes and we wouldn’t mind so much about our mistakes because it all smooths out.

Smooth as gravel. The passion through our souls illuminating that there are more important things than the little details, the nitpicking.

Rock N Roll is not about being perfect. It’s about doing and doing it with passion.

Yes, rock and roll is not about being perfect.

Thank you for listening, thank you for having a great time, enjoying yourself and singing your little heart out.

Thank you. I’ll talk to you soon, have a great day.