Everyone wants perfect, but how many people notice the perfection in that which is imperfect? Here are five examples that you probably never even knew of.:
1. The Portrait of George Washington on the $1 Bill. It's called the Atheneaum portrait, painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796. Commissioned by Martha Washington, Stuart painted the face and a bit of the shoulders and brown background for George, but that’s about where he stopped and left. Stuart saw this painting as a sort of a model for future paintings rather than as a work unto itself and so just kept the unfinished portrait for himself. Despite any future efforts, this one remains unfinished, imperfect, and the best of all efforts.
2. The Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer's initial plan was to have an entire collection of 120 stories to complete the anthology, but by the time he died in 1400, he had finished only 24. The reasons for stopping were never clear -- too many other obligations or other work? But many scholars have argued that in just the 24 written, Chaucer was able to take a rich slice of culture, social mores, philosophy, and history and present it in a condensed form far more memorable than 120 stories would have. The imperfect proved superior to aspired-for perfect.
3. Chocolate Chip Cookies. Ruth Wakefield owned and ran the Toll House Inn in Whitman, MA, in the 1930s. She was baking chocolate cookies when she ran out of baker's chocolate. In a pinch, she broke off pieces of a semi-sweet chocolate bar and dropped them into the dough, assuming those pieces would melt when baking and create chocolate cookies. However, instead of melting, the pieces held their shape and softened. She considered the exercise a failure until trying the cookies and circulating them to customers who actually found them rather delicious. And thus a global industry was born from "imperfect cookies."
4. Smoke Detectors. In the 1930s, Swiss physicist Walter Jaeger was trying to invent a sensor that could detect poison gas. Repeated attempts met with a frustrating result -- the unit could not always detect poison gas with certainty, but it did detect something else every time without error: smoke (from the cigarettes he kept smoking when testing the device). Jaeger was at first rather upset and disappointed in his device not being able to function optimally. That was until he realized how building fires could be thwarted with just such a device. Though initially only installed in commercial buildings and factories due to expense, now almost every home or apartment has them.
5. Post-It Notes. Dr. Spencer Silver was working to develop an incredibly strong adhesive in 1968 with certain properties to make it more useful and less toxic. Unfortunately, the best he could come up with was an incredibly weak adhesive. It was considered an imperfect creation with limited usability until one of his colleagues, Arthur Fry, heard of it. Fry used to cram papers and notes into his hymnal at church and was tired of them falling out all the time. A weak glue that could still hold paper in place without leaving a residue nor being strong enough to tear paper when removed was just what he needed. 3M began selling the Post-it Note in 1979, and it's useful imperfection is why it sits on your desk right now.
Read more about how imperfections are sometimes the most liberating and eye-opening things in Tom McLennan's new book The Magic of Imperfection.