By Dina Aldabbagh

There are three words in the English language that, when strung together, form perhaps the sweetest sounding phrase known to my ears:

“For our purposes”

I’m in grad school right now for architecture and my studio professor often says this phrase. In this studio class, we’re working through a multi-layered site development with a comprehensive scope of representations to develop and show our work. If you’ve ever worked on anything computer-software or detail based, you know that there is this commonality amongst all work of the such where you can go in circles for hours on some small thing. You get so in the weeds of a single detail because you want everything to be perfect. 

“For our purposes” is a system shock back to reality to fix your focus. For our purposes…it’s okay if the presentation isn’t perfect, it’s okay if the recipe is missing this ingredient, it’s okay if the dish isn’t sitting perfectly in the dishwasher. What’s the point of a dishwasher? To…wash the dishes. So as long as the dish is placed well enough that it gets clean, the purpose was achieved. You can choose to hone in on making sure all the dishes are placed in a certain way because you believe it’s “better,” but understand that it’s achieving the same exact purpose. It’s not giving you anything more to stress over the exact dish placement. You don’t get more from giving more past a certain point. This phrase is to say, “X thing doesn’t matter here. Let me not worry about it.” For “our” purposes calls you to ask what the point is of what you’re actually doing. 

Maybe the recipe is missing an ingredient, but…can it still be made? Is this ingredient crucial to the structure of the recipe or can it function without it? The more you cook, the more perspective you have on what is necessary and what is not in order to make something. “Can this dish stand without this ingredient? For our purposes, cinnamon isn’t necessary.” (Jk, it’s always necessary)

You can drive yourself crazy worrying about things that are actually inconsequential and not as big of roadblocks as you think they are, or you can move on. For our purposes, is this thing necessary to pay attention to for me to continue forward? 

When I worked in an elementary school, I was the go-to arts girl for our faculty. During Halloween week, I was tasked to make a mural to decorate a wall. I only had a very limited amount of time to work on it and at a certain point I got so stressed. I realized on my timeline I wasn’t going to be able to make it look as good as I wanted and that felt like impending failure. Then, it hit me — they don’t care. The kids don’t care if there are 3 pumpkins instead of 5. The teachers don’t care if there’s “too much” negative space on the mural. They just cared that the school felt festive.  

It was a shock to my system to realize I was missing the point and stressing myself out over nothing. Now, do I love when things I make look their best? Yes. But I didn’t have time for that here. And the secret is that I didn’t need to have time for that. I didn’t need enough time to make this my favorite piece of art I’ve ever done, I just needed enough to achieve the purpose — which was: make the school feel festive for the kids. 

When they walked in on Halloween, they were all excited and were staring at the mural with “Ooos” and “ahhs.” The teachers were going out of their way to tell me it looked great. Meanwhile I thought it was sub-average. For me. For my standards. But that didn’t matter, it achieved the purpose. 

Perfection — it’s a truly beautiful concept, isn’t it? For a piece of work to be faultless…for a human being to be without err…for a reality to be exactly the way you dreamed it up. Perfection is a beautiful concept, but the practice of trying to achieve it is tiresome.

The issue with perfection does not at all lie in the desire for something to be the ideal, but rather the issue is found in how we can burn ourselves out over things that just do not matter. “I’m a perfectionist” can be synonymous with “I care” — and it is a good thing to care, but about the right things. Know when to give your energy to what.  

You know, when I write these blogs they go through a drafting process, but it’s quick. I write the piece almost in a brain dump sort of sense — I just let the words come out. And then — if things don’t quite make sense or a reordering is necessary to get across my point — I do it. But most of my drafting process is a grammatical or language based development, I don’t reinvent the wheel with every draft. I’ve done this before with past work. I’ve taken creative stories and rewritten them from scratch four times over, only with the initial point in mind. But do you know how often I do those types of drafting processes now? It’s a rounding error. Not because iteration is bad — it’s good — but because these blogs don’t call for that level of iteration.

Iteration, development, attention to detail — it’s all a crucial tool in creation, but wisdom is knowing what asks that of you. I can write these blogs with the frequency of once a week because they require less out of me. They still take work — the commitment of time, effort, and thought — but they’re not the exhausting levels of trying to reach perfection with every blog. For this purpose, the way I’m drafting is sufficient. If I’m writing a novel? Well that’s something else. But not everything calls that level out of you. 

Knowing when to rest is important but knowing what to let rest is more important. You want longevity? You can’t exhaust yourself over everything. You have to find the purpose of what you’re doing and let that be your north star. Don’t get so tangled up in the weeds that you get stuck there and miss the point completely. There is a point — find it.

Most of life is wasted worrying about the wrong thing. This isn’t just true for work, it’s true in actually every facet of life. We worry about what a person who we barely know thinks of us. Why? What’s the purpose of tiring ourselves out for them? It’s one thing to care if your husband or wife respects you, it’s another to care if your Starbucks barista does. We often get caught up caring about things that don’t actually impact us past the level of impact we put on ourselves. Sometimes baristas are rude. Okay. They’re also fallible human beings who don’t perform perfection for every random stranger they come into contact with each day. 

So let’s say this barista “disrespects” you — whatever disrespect means to you — you can get upset. You can imagine yourself telling them off the next time you see them, plan to talk to their manager, internalize their rudeness as meaning that you don’t deserve basic kindness from strangers. Or you can realize…they don’t matter to you like that. That barista only has to matter as far as making your coffee. So why ruminate on a person whose purpose doesn’t even extend into your life past a cup of coffee? 

There is a point. To everything, there’s a purpose. It’s your job to find it. Not every human being we know has to be everything to us. Not everything we do has to be the best thing ever. Not every aspect of your project has to be the highest level of work you’ve ever done. This is not to say, “Get lazy,” but it is to say: find the point. Figure out what the purpose of this thing is, and let that be what gets your energy. 

I was working on a structural representation of where to place the beams and joists on a unit and things were just not adding up. I circled for like 5 hours one night trying to align every single line and after not getting any further than when I sat down, I finally called it a night. In my next class I talked to my professor and told him that for some reason this thing was ¼ inch off and that thing was 10 ¾ inches when it was supposed to be 11 ¼ inches and I couldn’t figure out why. My professor reminded me of an important lesson: “For our purposes, it doesn’t matter that you focus on that right now. It’s more important that you move on to the next stage of the project because that asks even more of you.”

These drawings were not for construction documents, they were meant to be representative of our understanding of the different elements that make up the structural integrity of a unit and how to visually represent that. My professor reminded me that I shouldn’t get bogged down by the details of this stage that don’t actually lend themselves to the purpose of why we’re doing the assignment — especially because the next stage was even more taxing. He was wise enough to say, “You need to move on. The next stage of this project needs your energy.”

The most successful people, I’ve noticed, don’t waste their energy. They quickly read situations, people, projects, and philosophies to figure out what the purpose of that specific thing is at this moment in time — and that is what gets their focus. They don’t let the unfriendly attitude of a coworker ruin their day, because they know that’s not the coworker’s purpose. People like this read the world differently — they compartmentalize. Not everything has to be everything to them. They can let their coworker be unkind, because they’ve created a community of people they love — so they’re not looking to every stranger to fill their “love” bucket. 

When they look at that unfriendly coworker, their priorities are clear: “Do they do their job well enough that it doesn’t negatively impact mine? Can they maintain an appropriate level of decency to have a comfortable work environment? Yes? Okay — boom. End of conversation.” “I don’t need them to be my best friend,” they’d tell you. 

Have you noticed some people go in circles in arguments? People who understand the purpose don’t do that. They don’t get pulled into every opportunity to fight. As human beings, sure, sometimes the moment will get to you — but generally a person who understands what the purpose of the conversation is and what this talk really needs to achieve just stays grounded in that. This helps them stay calm, because they’re not worrying about A, B, or C thing that they could get angry about. Their focus is sharp. 

A lack of focus is typically indicative of two types: a fool, or someone who doesn’t have a full enough perspective. When you’re green, you don’t always have the vantage point to understand what really matters. That comes with time. Or — it doesn’t, and you get grouped in with the fools. But hear me when I say this: sometimes a lack of focus actually looks like too much focus — but focus on the wrong thing. This is where, when you don’t understand the purpose, you can get lost and go in circles, tiring yourself out to not be able to get up and fight the good fight another day. 

You need your energy. Know what matters. Let “for our purposes” ring in your mind as you go through your day. In every single situation — and I do mean each and every — you have to catch yourself and say, “for our purposes, is this good enough?” When you want to circle and overextend, ask yourself if it’s actually necessary. When it is, that is when you’ll really want to do it. There are times to extend as far as possible — to push the intensity and the effort and tire yourself out to what seems like your breaking point — but those are nowhere near as often as we trick ourselves to believe. 

The trap when you are trained to care so deeply about every single thing is that you typically miss the actual moments that matter. Perspective, in my opinion, is the single best tool you can use and gift you can give yourself every day. It never runs out, only grows. It is when you lack perspective that you think the small things are mountains and the mountains are small things. Perhaps your eye is just very close to that small thing and you don’t realize that the mountain that is far away is actually much bigger than you can grasp from your viewpoint.  

That thing can be 1% of your life, but if you give it 100% of your attention, it becomes 100%. Don’t lose sight of what actually matters. Step back and look at the full picture. When you do, you often realize that that thing really was just 1% — you were just looking at it so long that you forgot.