One of my favorite Secrets of Adulthood is: Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.

For instance, when we watch someone do something precisely and perfectly—a ballet dancer, an acrobat, a basketball player—we become more interested when we get to witness an obvious mistake. The misstep holds people’s interest and reminds them of just how demanding this activity is.

For this reason, an accomplished juggler will often deliberately drop a prop. 

An interesting illustration of this Secret of Adulthood comes from the life of Winston Churchill. I wrote a short, unconventional biography of Winston Churchill, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill. What a joy it was to work on that book! What a life, what a subject. 

Churchill is justly celebrated for his extraordinary speeches, and he spent an enormous amount of time writing and rehearsing them. Early in his career, he’d been humiliated when he blanked out during a speech, and he made a point always to be very well prepared. 

In his biography The Last Lion, William Manchester notes that although Churchill’s speeches were written in advance, and with a great deal of attention to every word, Churchill gave himself stage directions such as “pause; grope for word” or  “stammer; correct self” to give the impression he was extemporizing.

Churchill knew that an imperfect speech would be more persuasive and moving than a perfect speech, and like the juggler, he chose to make his performance better by making it worse.

Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.