"The height of perfection. No one is born complete; perfect yourself and your activities day by day until you become a truly consummate being, your talents and your qualities all perfected. This will be evident in the excellence of your taste, the refinement of your intellect, the maturity of your judgement, the purity of your will. Some never manage to be complete; something is always missing. Others take a long time. The consummate man, wise in word and sensible in deed, is admitted into, and even sought out for, the singular company of the discreet."
The above maxim is from Baltasar Gracián's timeless classic How to Use Your Enemies. This little book (just £0.99p for the Kindle edition) is an absolute treasure-trove of timeless wisdom on how to navigate life's twists and turns.
Gracián's thoughts on perfecting oneself are absolutely fascinating to me. How few of us ever make an inventory of our strengths and weaknesses then resolve to rectify our shortcomings. Certainly for myself, it's been an incredibly long journey to even begin this process!
Sadly, many people never change; they enter old age with the flaws they had at 20. They're petty, immature, mean-spirited, narrow-minded, unworldly - a sorry state of affairs indeed.
This need not be you. Since you're reading this, you're likely one of the few wise souls who understands the appeal of Gracián's words. To 'perfect yourself and your activities day by day' is certainly a challenge, but it need not be an overwhelming one.
The first step is to list your flaws, be they of temperament, knowledge, education or worldliness. Don't hold back: it's between you and your notebook - be ruthlessly honest.
Do some of your flaws make you flinch? Excellent! You've just discovered an opportunity for self-improvement. Take it a day at a time and aim for modest, incremental improvements. Be consistent, and you can make significant progress in a month or two. In a year or two, you can transform yourself.
And it's never too late to begin this process. Perfecting oneself – although never 100% possible – is an eminently worthy undertaking at any age, and certainly one of the most satisfying.