There Will Always Be a Gap Between Dreams and Reality

It’s easy to imagine the perfect life, down to each small detail. It’s harder to put it into practise, because actually living it will involve multiple small compromises.

It’s the same with making a piece of art. The perfect novel exists in your head. As soon as you start writing it however, it changes on a sentence by sentence level until it is different to the novel in your head.

We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off – because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Four-Thousand-Weeks-by-Oliver-Burkeman-2021