"Ah!" said a brave painter to me, thinking on these things. "If a man has failed you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day."
From Power, Essays, The Conduct of Life by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nowadays, I hear the phrase "work smarter, not harder" to describe a more refined approach to the daily grind. Here, I think the passage is talking more about not just a job, but a specific life or purpose. There is no end, and in that respect, so long as the purpose is worked for and toward, a person cannot fail.
The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation; and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine ... Every thing is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.
Perfectionists require that a work or project be completed "just so" and that may result in the project never being complete. Here I think he means that so long as you concentrate and put out work as a result of that concentration, it is better to have done it and not wasted your life - or dissipate it. I think also that he has a problem with frivolity and delusion. Today, I was reading a post about how overwhelmingly revolutionary some blockchain projects are described to be - yet we see daily how many have not come close to the goal or are only imitations of a non-blockchain tool. It is better to concentrate on one likely successful thing after disabusing ourselves of a delusional perspective. Faithful work - true work.
You must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest.
This at first glance reads harshly. This may come closer to living one's life with intent and choice, recognizing limitations and then it makes life easier. You can drop all those things that were either not your choice or not within capacity. This takes a lot of courage in my opinion. Often the practical sounds boring - but consider something that is chosen by you. Would you choose a boring personal goal? At some point, I came to acknowledge my limitations. Within those parameters, the challenge is to make that restriction an interesting work of personal art.
