The Temple of Perfect: A history and reframe of the word
The concept of perfection can be traced back in history as something pondered in human civilization and thought to Ancient Egypt (I could trace it to around 2600 BC, give or take). The Egyptians viewed the concept of Ma’at as a way to strive for an “ideal” order of life. For them, Ma’at balanced truth, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Its context was philophical, theological, and metaphysical… not literal.
By the mid-300’s BC, Aristotle’s notion of perfection involved achieving excellence and fulfilling one’s purpose. Perfection was really viewed as the realization of potential and the attainment of an ideal state. Aristotle was all about the ideal outcome, not the ideal (perfect) inputs/actions.
Fast forward a few hundred years and we find the first appearance of the roots of a single word revolving around the concept of perfection - the Latin verb perficere, which meant “to finish,” “to accomplish,” or “to complete,” and was in use as early as the 1st century BC. Perfectus (the past participle of Perficere) is the root of the word we know today as perfect.
What I find interesting, and in today’s world quite damaging, is that somewhere along the arc of history, the original concepts and definition of perfect that were based on completion, fulfilling a purpose, or achieving potential - became perverted into what has become simultaneously an aspirational and damaging concept in today’s world.
Today’s definition, to get us all on the same page, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “being entirely without fault or defect; corresponding to an ideal standard or abstract concept.”
And hey, I’m all about high-performance and improvement - and the concept of striving towards and eventually achieving an ideal standard or perfect state is what life is about, right?
Today, we tend to Pray to the Temple of Perfect.
Which is really to say, we pray to the Temple of Flawless Inputs - the “perfect” actions we try to do or temporary things we have in order to theoretically achieve our ultimate goals.
Today, hundreds of millions “follow” people not for the Ma’at version of their perfection - the summary of their accomplishments or the end state they’ve achieved or completed - but often because of their ability to showcase random “perfections” in 30-second chunks on TikTok or Instagram Reels.
We seek out and we honor a broad spectrum of perfect - 100% “perfect” diets, 100% “perfect” sleep habits, 100% “perfect” wardrobes, sports moments, leadership habits, bodies, hair - the list can go on forever.
Perfection in our inputs will create the conditions for the ultimate success we’re looking for. That’s the rule we’ve been told and thus something to aspire to. But…
How did we get from there to here?
The Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans all seemed to understand that no one and nothing is, by our present definition, “perfect” and thus they didn’t need to provide a word for something so unattainable.
It was right around the Renaissance (14th to 17th centuries AD) as an emphasis on human potential and achievement was revived that we start to see the concept of perfection not only meaning moral and theological completeness, but also morphing into the literal realm of artistic, intellectual, and physical excellence.
This appears to be the time when perfect went from being an ideal state or completed outcome - a harmony of multiple factors or the end goal/achievement; to a flawless input - an individual thing or a specific action being perfect.
This evolution of the word and idea, rather than creating a new word for flawlessness, appears to be born more out of laziness than stupidity, but who are we to judge because stupid is as stupid does.
What we do know is that change, the morphing of the old Egyptian-Roman philosophy in to a clearly unattainable state of lawlessness, has had one of the most profound consequences on humankind than 99% of language evolutions.
For one - it gave us something incredible to aspire to. The idea that we can strive to being or doing things flawlessly has inspired and motivated many to greatness, even as those aspiring to achieve that perfection instinctually understood true perfection wasn’t possible. For example, even as we won the Olympics by more than any other sled in over a decade, our performative actions were still far from anything we would call perfect.
Conversely, the people for whom the idea that a flawless state of perfection actually exists but may never have come close have been tricked into believing perfection is possible and suffer the consequences.
In my opinion, the historic levels of obesity, apathy, anxiety, and depression can not not be blamed on people believing they can’t reach perfection so they don’t try, or they do try, never reach it, and thus punish themselves for being less than perfect.
What if the definition and our understanding of the word has been so misunderstood, and then propagated and replicated by inexperienced, unaccomplished idiots for centuries, that it’s lost the purpose of why humans started to leverage it to begin with?
And more importantly, what if we were to reframe Perfect and take it back to a Ma’at-Perfectus combo?
The Introduction of a new definition derived from Ma’at & Perfectus - Perfect as an Optimal Equilibrium to Achieve a Desired Outcome
Very subtly, like a butterfly flapping its wings in the timeline of my own life twenty years ago, Dr. John Berardi entered my life. (queue melodramatic music and some slow motion) JB, as he’s affectionately known in the nutrition industry and to his friends (and his wife), was the founder/owner of Precision Nutrition and is one of the most respected nutritionists in the entire world. To me, JB has evolved from a nutritionist, then a friend, then a mentor, then a guru. It was JB talking to me about his mental health challenges that made it ok for me to talk about my own, amongst many other eye-opening conversations.
I first met JB when he attended a Team USA bobsled push camp in Calgary, Canada, in 2004. He came straight from the airport to watch us train in the icehouse. Our coach, Stu (McMillan), picked him up and brought him to watch training. JB casually strolled up to us carrying a bag of Subway for his lunch. I stopped my warmup and said, “Subway? Stu, you let him get Subway?!”
Subway was on Stu’s “banned” list since we stayed away from breads other than 7-grain, of which Subway didn’t sell at the time. And those processed meats? Forget about it. One of Stu’s nutrition “rules” was that no fuel was better than bad fuel - on par with you’d rather let the car die on the side of the road than put the wrong gasoline in it, so you at least don’t ruin the engine.
And what JB said next changed my perspective, and Stu’s, on Perfect for my diet at the time, and on the entire premise of the word itself, later.
JB smiled and said, “It’s better to have something in your belly than nothing.” I looked at Stu as he tilted his head, smirked, and shrugged his shoulders with a “well, I guess we were wrong about that” connotation.
(The athlete/nutrition nuance here is that JB taught us that it’s worse for our bodies to be deprived of the needed energy than it is to put ‘bad’ energy in - it’s the lesser of two evils. We were previously working off the model that deprivation was the lesser of the evils.)
From then on, we followed JB’s rule that the “Perfect” diet for us was to ensure 90% of our meals were “on plan” and he didn’t care what the other 10% looked like.
JB’s definition of perfection, in retrospect, aligns with the original intention of Ma’at and Perfectus. And without me realizing it, over the following years and on my way to Olympic Gold, the concept of Ma’at, not individual-action perfection, was the ultimate driver of my success.
Many people I’ve coached - both athletes and execs - wonder why JB was so flippant with the last 10% and why I don’t push them to be “Perfect”. ‘Isn’t that where the difference is made between good and great, between greatness and excellence?,’ they say.
Here’s the thing - in the case of a diet of a high-performance athlete, 90% turns out to be the optimal (perfect) level of accuracy of diet to achieve the “desired outcome” - optimal performance - because the food we put into our bodies doesn’t just happen in isolation.
JB taught us that the equilibrium of all training factors, or the sum of the parts, was more important than finding perfection in each of the parts. And perfection in each of the parts would actually be detrimental to the desired outcome.
Trippy, huh?
Well, we are humans and nothing takes place in isolation. We have thoughts, worries, anxieties, external pressures, and external responsibilities that all feed into any one task we are trying to find perfection in. Our time, attention, and stress is a zero sum game. Time and energy towards one realm is always at the sacrifice of another.
We’re constantly tweaking our own, personal algorithm to achieve maximum efficiency and results.
The cost of a 100% ‘perfect’ diet is counterproductive. The final 10% creates diminishing returns. When we find ourselves stressing about reaching a 100% diet threshold - the time and energy put into weighing, preparing, and packing everything necessary causes too much stress.
That stress increases cortisol levels, which decreases natural testosterone production, which ultimately decreases performance, recovery and strength - the entire purpose of eating for performance to begin with.
And thus the “perfect” diet had a negative impact on other major and important aspects of our training to be the best in the world.
This method turned out to be far superior to what we had been doing, which was dealing with the anxiety of all the pre-planning that went into making sure we had the perfect food accessible to us at all times… and then depriving ourselves of food when we were in positions where we couldn’t get our hands on the perfect food.
So the next time you are examining where you can be perfect in your life, your work, your investing, your fitness, your diet, or your parenting - consider this:
Forget what some dudes in the Renaissance re-defined perfect as, and revert back to the Ancient Egyptians’ concept of Ma’at and the Romans’ Perfectus. Look for the optimal equilibrium of all of the priorities and factors in your life, try to understand how each one impacts the others, and strive for your ideal outcome and your ideal completion, not something worthy of a perfect Instagram Reel.
Is it likely to be more complicated, make you examine aspects of your life you may not have/may not want to? Yes.
Is it going to be the singular action silver bullet so many self-help gurus and coaches attempt to sell you like cold tubs or believing in yourself? No.
Does it give us the best chance to be more sustainable and effective in the medium and long term in our lives? Overwhelmingly Hell Yes.
- Steve
