Why elegant work feels easy (even when it isn't) 🪁

If you’re like me and you have a perfectionistic streak in your personality, I’m about to say something ground-breaking:

What if trying less hard was actually the most ambitious thing you could do?

I know. Shocking.

For perfectionists, doing stuff with ambition is just code for overdoing stuff. Overthinking, overachieving, and overexerting yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, perfectionism has its perks: you usually notice details and nuances where many others don’t, you’re probably very conscientious and full of deep curiosity and intrinsic motivation for accomplishing what matters to you. But let’s be honest, you probably treat every task like it's dead serious—confusing a deadline with a death sentence. 💀

You make yourself jump through impossibly high hoops, and then fueled by the fear of not getting it right, you get stuck on details. You linger in the attractive limbo of planning, optimizing, refining, tweaking, tinkering… until you have a headache.

You’ve heard of other people setting reasonable standards for themselves, while you’ve never seen your standards do anything but creep higher and higher.

So what’s the remedy?

It has nothing to do with lowering your standards, but seeing those standards in a different light. Seeing them as essential, but not as something you can turn into a weapon against yourself. It’s easier said than done of course, but nevertheless, this is a rich (and liberating) topic to explore for perfectionistic and ambitious people who want to excel without burning out.

It's what has prompted me to think more deeply about the relationship between elegance and excellence recently.

In some contexts they are interchangeable notions, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I like to think of elegance as basically the next level above excellence. Meaning: excellent work is already great, but elegant work is even better.

As we know, reaching excellence means a lot of effort, so does reaching elegance require even more effort, then? Not necessarily, and in any case, neither of them should imply a need for perfectionism.

Reaching elegance has actually much more to do with knowing how to do less strategically and how to make the process feel more enjoyable. Just think of someone whose work you admire deeply. Do you think they just resented every second they were working on a masterpiece, or do you think they were mostly just having fun?

That's what we sense in elegant work—that whoever made it sincerely enjoyed the pursuit. They pushed through many obstacles along the way, but all in all, they felt fulfilled pursuing excellence in their craft.

So beyond excellent work, elegance is what happens when you bring a touch of flair to it—flair that stems from playfulness and finding fun ways to do things.

These are the facets of elegance we’ll go deeper into over the next few weeks. 😁

For now, I’d like to leave you with these two questions:

Where in your life are you confusing effort with strain? What would it look like to make the same pursuit easier and more fun—more elegant?

Have an elegant weekend!

Bisous,

Elle