Practice makes better, but who’s practising what?

I believe in practice although I’m not a perfectionist. Perfectionism sounds exhausting and soul destroying. If I were to pass on one pearl of wisdom (aka unsolicited advice) to the next generation, it would be this: effort is rewarded, for sure, but only up to a point. The key to living your best life is to find that sanity-preserving sweet spot for reward maximisation. I’m talking about the effort to reward ratio. If you have a passion, a gift, an obsession, an amazing talent, then sure, do what it takes and follow your dream. Kudos to you! Thing is, you’ll still have to function as a grown-up human in this world so even you, talented dreamer, will need to find that balance. There’s no getting around the boring, repetitive, time-consuming but compulsory stuff that we have to do. Which takes practice because we are not born with these skills.   We might argue that we are acing life if we have:  mastered basic self care; achieved some qualifications; secured gainful employment; acquired the right to live away from our childhood bedroom; and nailed the ability to maintain our independent dwelling in a pestilence-excluding manner.

Pretty straightforward, right? And yet, a woman knows that she’ll need to do a damn sight more just to get by in life, never mind acing it. For her, basic self care (daily shower, clipped nails, maybe some deodorant, clean underwear and functional clothes) is a fantasy. The reality involves shiny hair, perfect (barely visible but very much there) makeup,  painted nails, the correct outfit for the occasion, preferably in the right size. If she lives in the correct part of the world, she can get the qualifications she’ll need to thrive. This is not a given. This woman can expect to get a decent job, commensurate to her academic achievement. Roughly equal academic practice in childhood means brother and sister can theoretically access the same jobs. And yet, he gets to continue on the basic pathway while she will, very insidiously, find herself  doing a whole lot more. It’ll look like equality until you factor in hair, makeup, nails and clothes. It’ll look like equality if you disregard the gender pay gap, and that’s before the motherhood penalty kicks in. She earns less, so now it makes sense for her to take the parental leave even though technically it’s for either parent. She earns less because she took maternity leave so she wasn’t promoted. She trades promotion for flexibility because it turns out the kids are not programmable machines, or if they are, they perma-glitch like an elderly iPad past its update capacity.  And her poorly paid flexibility now qualifies her for extra domestic chores because she happens to be home, lucky her! She wakes up one day and realises that he’s cruising his way to top brass (having had uninterrupted practice), basic-adulting in his own home.  Meanwhile she’s well-practised on the domestic front, has acquired the mental load and is looking at her career in the rear view mirror…

This could be seen as teamwork but only one of the team members gets paid. The other might get praise, but for that she’ll have to do more than keep pestilence at bay. She’s the CEO of the household, sure, but her underlings tend to fail on all their KPIs with zero meaningful consequences. She picks up the slack because rats aren’t great pets. Also, the kids need education and entertainment and clothing and feeding and bathing. To make matters worse, her in-laws, her neighbours, her friends, even some random people on Insta are watching and judging,  and finding her wanting. The pressure is on. Turns out that running a household requires constant vigilance and the uncanny ability to anticipate disaster before it occurs.

So it’s easy for me to talk about easing up on the whole perfection thing. The reality is that we have less room for imperfection because our spinning plates will start crashing if we stop paying attention. As no-one else can/wants to see them, it’s easier for us to keep them spinning rather than picking up the broken shards which result from failed attempts at task delegation in the pursuit of fairness. We can’t quite work out why we have acquired so many plates but we seem to have a system. Trouble is, by the time we realise it’s unsustainable, we no longer have the bandwidth to modify it. We sacrifice our health just to carry on  rather than attempting to share the load. Plate dropping by the putative helper (who tends to willfully misunderstand what’s at stake) isn’t an option.

Or is it?

Ok, hear me out.

We are conditioned/flattered into believing that as women, we are naturally better at the domesticity stuff. All sorts of reality-adjacent reasons. We’re made of sugar and spice and all things nice. We’re more conscientious. We are better at multi-tasking. Our brains are wired differently. We are born with maternal instinct and empathy. We’re team players. We are better at intuiting what others need. More likely to be perfectionists.

And you know, it works. Every time we show the smallest tendency towards one of these so-called inbuilt traits, we are praised (which is reward enough, FYI, let’s not be greedy now). The praise-induced dopamine hit causes the brain to make you do it again. Habits are formed.

But it’s all an elaborate con! Trouble is, it’s a con that starts at birth and that we are all complicit in, even when we should know better. Look, I’m aware of the 2025 Cambridge study which suggests that, on a population level, newborn girl brains seem to have more grey matter (better for memory and emotional regulation) but the authors stressed that:

“The differences we see do not apply to all males or all females, but are only seen when you compare groups of males and females together. There is a lot a variation within, and a lot of overlap between, each group”

So let’s not use this not-yet-replicated study of only 500 babies to jump to too many conclusions. Otherwise we are accidentally perpetuating the con.

When you allow an average man to do basic adulting his whole life, you free up his time to live his best life. But behind every average man, there’s a low-paid/no-paid servant/wife/slave: someone doing the childcare, life admin, the shopping, the cleaning. A woman today can live her best life but she’ll be an eccentric cat lady. The real con is believing that this is a tragedy. It’s not.

The real con is that men get to be perfectionists in their chosen fields without being constrained by the “unimportant” stuff which somehow (very conveniently), women get to excel at. While looking foxy. Lucky us!

Feminism has only partly addressed this con. It has enabled women to “have it all.” This is also a scam. Having it all means doing it all while performing gratitude. Granted permission to dream while sorting out reality. Allowed to fly high, but tethered to the home; grateful for the view but constrained by duty, which has in no way lessened. The con is that we are taught to perform perfect feminism, whatever the hell that is. But while we’re busy arguing amongst ourselves about the precise definition of feminism and who can join the club (newsflash: men can be feminists and not all women are) and whether female brains are wired differently (nope)… we are distracted from achieving equality. This suits the guys who aren’t terribly interested in true domestic teamwork.

Thus:  we should let them acquire plates. Lots of them.  Early on. We should allow them to practice. We should expect satisfactory progress on the understanding that they aren’t stoopid. When the plates break, we have to let them pick up the shards. And make them start over. That’s how we learned; we also made mistakes which we had to fix and try not to repeat. Because practice makes better. We should expect high standards and penalise anything less. We should unlearn our own perfection programming, because good enough is just that. Also, trust me: nothing terrible happens when the odd plate drops.

We should all be following our own fun, life-affirming  dreams. Teamwork as standard.  Perfection not required.