Quote of the week...from Sheryl Sandberg

Done is better than perfect.    --Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg is chief operating officer at Facebook...you can react to that information in either a positive or negative way.  I have my own mixed feelings about this pervasive social media site.  It does connect people across the planet and years, reuniting many who had lost touch for decades and live far from one another...I like that.  And it gives me a link through which I can place my daily blog articles...another thumbs up.  But it also tends to bubble off people within likeminded groups, reinforcing the same biased political and social narratives while diminishing alternative views...that's a problem. And I'm not so keen on the tendency for this social media site to be focused on personal bonding and popularity over the exchange of information and truth. Having said all that, I picked the above quote of Sandberg's not for what I think of Facebook, but because it's so appropriate to just about any area of life...at least outside the operating room or nuclear facility, that is.  It's all about the tendency for some people to have difficulty starting, much less finishing, projects because they are obsessed with avoiding any mistakes in the process.  And mistakes are the catalyst in learning, very necessary for eventually attaining excellence in anything. Most folks, though, do not want to be responsible for anything that makes them vulnerable to criticism...or even worse, derision...from others.  YouTube, Yelp and Goodreads are loaded with critical comments...some of them reaching essay length...blasting the creative efforts of contributors, sometimes in very hurtful language.  I remember finding an Arkansas pastor's efforts at teaching Biblical Greek on a YouTube site.  For introducing interested people to the meanings of ancient Greek expressions and words of the New Testament, he fulfilled his purpose although he obviously didn't pronounce like a native.  For this he was rewarded with a pretty nasty comment on his site by a native Greek speaker who was offended that a nonnative would undertake this sort of effort and that his lessons were worthless. People with different agendas and narratives than me will often strictly scrutinize what I do and say and be readily available for criticism, even if it involves twisting things completely out of context or cherry-picking for items to ridicule.  That's just human nature in one of its common, crappy forms, and I'm not going to seek an impossible perfection in my daily walk just to appease massively imperfect, heavily flawed critics.  And now I'm done with this admittedly imperfect article: time to move on to the rest of my day...