You’re a word person – you love writing, playing with language, moving words around to create the most perfect sentences, your best paragraphs and your most awesome stories, books, or blog posts.
You love getting things right – creating the ideal environment in which to write, setting up the perfect scenario to get your projects done, and celebrating in the ultimate, delicious way. You always give it your best effort.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Your superlatives are killing you.
In our minds, there exists this wonderful landscape. In it, we’re at our optimal weight and body mass index. We make the most efficient use of our time. We do our very best in our work, our relationships and with our creative projects.
In reality, we can’t live up to this superlative lifestyle. We work hard, we open ourselves to learning and growth. But we don’t ever operate in a best, perfect or ideal scenario.
We battle our inner critic. We struggle to stay focused. We hack away at our calendars to carve out even the smallest amount of time to write our book. The dog barfs on our notebooks. Traffic makes us late. Life is always throwing curveballs at our superlative dreams.
That’s the first problem with superlatives – they don’t match the world we live in. The second problem? When it comes time to asses whether we’ve done our best or had the perfect experience, our brains seem to throw up road blocks. Try it.
Who is your favorite author?
I’ll wait while you think about that.
What happened? Chances are, your mind accesses a slew of authors and when you had several in mind, you were unable to quantify favorite. Your mind did loops justifying why each one was your favorite.
(If you were able to name just one person, kudos. You probably don’t have trouble choosing which project to focus on, what to order off the menu, or what to wear. You are gifted in focus, so enjoy it.)
You will do this when trying to list your favorite moments and enumerate your best wins and your shining successes. With superlatives as your compass, you won’t be able to fully absorb the nutrients of your success.
We go through again and again: this superlative lifestyle is always out of reach in our imagination. We don’t know how, really, to quantify ‘best’. We don’t even know when we’ve done our very best. Superlative lifestyle leaves us in an endless loop of striving and dissatisfaction.
Superlatives may seem good and useful, but rarely can we measure our lives and creative efforts by them.
Tell me – does this superlative lifestyle screw you up? Or do words like ‘best’, ‘favorite’ and ‘perfect’ help you feel creatively inspired? Dish in a comment below; I’d love to know what you think about this.
I’m always asking kids, “What’s your favorite _____” and I haven’t learned yet that it always draws a blank stare. Maybe it’s my most awesome facial hair configuration that drops their jaws, or maybe it’s just the stupidest superlative driven question. Superlatives are the most overrated form of expression, mostly… the mostlyest… unless you’re Churchill of course, then it’s just true that, “short words are best, and old words, when short, are best of all.” I think I’ll go do something ordinary now.
David,
I’m sure it’s your delivery that has the kids dumbfounded. You’re mesmerizing like that! 🙂
But seriously, I noticed these two things about superlatives are sneakily erosive to our ability to enjoy life. It’s just impossible to choose and we never can meet the standard of best.
Luckily there are plenty of other words to apply to our efforts.
Thanks for commenting and making up a new word in the process!
GREAT point about how superlatives end writing because, ironically, we value quality. But no writing does not generate quality. No writing generates no writing. “Nothing will come of nothing.” (KING LEAR)
So we must throttle superlatives and keep writing.
Hi Karen!
I am glad this resonates with you. We need to keep an eye on our language and make sure it’s not interfering with what we want for ourselves and the world!