You have to pursue a discipline of one form or another to be happy in your life, says Nick Offerman as he explains his life’s philosophy and why he loves woodworking. Just don’t chase after perfection and learn to love mistakes.
Well I often espouse a general philosophy in my life of pursuing a discipline of one sort or another. But it’s not to ever approach any level of perfection. You start, you go in knowing that as human beings we never can achieve perfection, and so I feel like mastery of any skill or art form really more involves becoming much better at covering your mistakes. But no matter how much of a virtuoso a person becomes I feel like if they’re still in the mentality of a student pursuing their discipline then they’ll never finish ripping out a Beethoven symphony or playing a game of basketball and say, “There, I’ve done it. That was the perfect rendition.” Instead what keeps us living and what keeps me vitally engaged is a constant pursuit of betterment. So I gave up on perfect a long time ago, and now I’m just chasing halfway decent.
Part of this philosophy I’m talking about came to me naturally. I grew up in a family out in the country in Illinois. Both my mom and dad grew up on farms. I grew up working on my mom’s family’s farms. And so we were very frugal. It was very Little House on the Prairie in the 70s and 80s which means we had a television but we were still raising as much garden as we could and everything – we got this free farmhouse in exchange – my dad had to build some cabinets for this farmer and we hired a guy to roll this house six miles and then we spent our lives there improving it. We painted it every couple of years; we built a little barn.
And so I don’t know, just by naturally learning to enrich in my own life…
