Natalie Portman, Pacquiao and the pursuit of perfection

Have no fear of perfection — you’ll never reach it. — Salvador Dali 

No pain, no gain. What physical and emotional sacrifices and even great pain did it take for passionate artists like Michelangelo, Vincent Van Gogh, Mozart or Beethoven, Li Po or William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway or Gabriel Garcia Marquez to illuminate our world with their world-class excellence?

What tortured demons within themselves did they have to wrestle and seek to overcome or conquer in their relentless quest for perfection and glory?

Even boxing champion Manny Pacquiao and other remarkable athletes like the legendary heavyweight boxing champ Muhammad Ali: what price and arduous personal sacrifices did they have to endure to win hard-fought successes?

My favorite Hollywood actress, the beautiful and brainy Harvard-educated Natalie Portman, definitely deserves to win the Oscar for Best Actress due to her fantastic and phantasmagorical performance as the delicately wondrous ballet dancer Nina Sayers in the masterpiece Black Swan directed by Darren Aronofsky.

I was hooked from start to finish by the exceedingly well-made, intensely entertaining, beautifully beguiling yet also at times grotesque and starkly nightmarish film Black Swan.

 It is a psychological thriller, drama, suspense and mystery film all rolled into one about the struggles of Nina, the newly-chosen star of a New York ballet group’s production of Swan Lake, as well as her rivals led by the sensuous Lilly (played by Mina Kunis), her strong-willed ex-dancer mother (Barbara Hershey), the former ballet star Beth Mcintyre (played by Winona Ryder) and their demanding, seemingly sex-craving male director.

When I asked my Twitter friend, topnotch prima ballerina Lisa Macuja-Elizalde, to comment on this film which explores a different side of the world of ballet, she replied: “I thought the film wasn’t flattering to our profession at all, but very well acted!”

When asked if she had performed in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet — the same ballet in which the movie’s protagonist Nina performs the lead roles of both White Swan and the evil Black Swan — Lisa said: “Have danced Odette/Odile many times but never grew wings onstage. 1st time was in Havana, Cuba.” Wow!

A Secret To Great Success:The 10,000-Hour Rule

Aside from arts and other fields, one endeavor with lots of success exemplars is the arena of sports. I have read about the excruciating discipline and nonstop years of daily practice put in by the likes of world-class athletes like basketball icon Michael Jordan, swimmer Michael Phelps, Chinese gymnast Li Ning or bicycle champion Lance Armstrong.

In order to win his eight gold medals in the epic Beijing Olympic, Phelps trained for six hours a day six days a week, even during holidays. He swam about 80 kilometers a week which is about 12.8 kilometers every training day.

It is not only the physical act of practicing a sport, work, craft, vocation or doing an art which is important, it is also practicing and psyching one’s self up mentally for challenges. Michael Jordan once replied to questions about how he was able to accomplish even seemingly impossible basketball shots by saying: “I’ve hit those shots a million times in my head.”

One astonishingly simple secret to world-class success is revealed by bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success. Throughout his interesting work, Gladwell repeatedly cited the “10,000-Hour Rule” of scholar Dr. Anders Ericsson, who claims the key to success in any endeavor is mainly due to steadfastly practicing a specific task for about 10,000 hours.

Good news! This 10,000-hour rule can still be attained, even if we didn’t start early on as kids dabbling in science, music, arts or other fields. He said this can be achieved with 20 hours of work a week or roughly about three hours per day for 10 years.

So what does this 10,000-hour rule tell us, if indeed this theory is true? It seems to overwhelmingly show that more than just natural talent, we need hard work and perseverance to create amazing successes.

Should we aspire for perfection? If we’re not dreaming of becoming Olympic winners or other world champions, why do we then have to exert so much effort and make such personal sacrifices?

In our Philippine society, lots of people are born with diverse God-given talents, but many of us are often held back by our Puwede na iyan or “It’s already good enough” mindset. We should never be content with minimum standards. We should not be tolerant of mediocrity. Let us raise and maintain high benchmarks.

I believe we should always strive for perfection, though perfection is unattainable, so that we can at least achieve consistent excellence in life and flourish in whatever it is we want to do!

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