“Above all, don't aim for excellence, devote all your efforts to accepting your imperfection!
»: this is now, if I am to believe the treatises on positive psychology, the message that should be conveyed to our children.
Don't think I'm making it up or exaggerating.
In Tal Ben-Shahar's book, the title of which is a whole program in itself (
L'Apprentissage de l'imperfection
, Pocket), a work prefaced by Christophe André, this professor at Harvard University, who is presented as one of the great figures of positive psychology, never ceases to deliver the following advice to his students as to his disciples:
“The list of collateral damage of the obsessive quest for “perfect everywhere” is long.
Lots of trouble ahead, then, if we don't learn to curb our perfectionist tendencies."
Well then!
I think this gentleman must not have visited a college class since at least May 68 - otherwise he might have realized that the ideas of excellence and perfection...
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