RULE 47

You are not perfect, and you don’t have to be.

You might be tempted to look at the images of impossibly thin models, or celebrities with (apparently) perfect skin and six-pack abs, who hop on a Gulfstream jet to go shopping, and decide that your own body and maybe your whole life sucks.

But Celebrity World is a cartoonish fantasy: you inhabit the real world, where people occasionally have bad skin or a few extra pounds and have to drive their mom’s Saturn to Wal-Mart. And that’s OK, because it’s reality and (almost) everybody else lives there too. Deal with it.

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Apparently, though, a lot of young people are having a hard time with that. Your Prom magazine, for example, estimates that the average teenager now spends more than six hundred dollars on the prom. Searching for an explanation for the increasingly lavish price tag, the Chicago Sun-Times noted: “Today’s teens are the first generation to grow up in perfection immersion: extreme makeovers, designer labels, unprecedented societal preoccupation with celebrity. Their expectations for prom are wildly inflated compared to those of their parents, who graduated in an era when limousines were for weddings, funerals and rich folks.”169

But chasing perfection usually ends up in frustration, because somebody will always be doing more. Even in our zero-tolerance time, this applies to other areas of life as well, because sooner or later everybody screws up. Heroes stumble, champions have bad days, and even saints can get it wrong. But don’t make the mistake of defining people solely by their flaws.

An Episcopal priest named John Hughes tells a story about his brief encounter with Mother Teresa in the mid-1980s.170 Mother Teresa was already world-famous for her work with the poor, perhaps second only to the pope in the world of religious celebrity. Hughes and his wife were visiting Calcutta and helping care for destitute men at a home called Prem Dan.

Hughes admits that he was a bit starstruck at the prospect of meeting the famous nun. But during their visit, they had only caught brief glimpses of her and had become reconciled to the probability that they would never actually meet the extraordinary woman who had moved the world with her pleas for charity.

One day, about two weeks before they were scheduled to leave Calcutta, John was sitting in Prem Dan, changing the bandages on the men there. The process involved cutting off the old bandage, cleaning the wounds, applying Neosporin, and then reapplying the bandage.

While he was working, a nun sat down next to him, fingering her prayer beads. At first, Hughes thought it was his friend, a Sister Cyriac, and kept working. When he finally did look over, he found he was sitting only a few feet from Mother Teresa, who sat quietly, looking him directly in the eye.

Dumbstruck—he says that he “sort of blacked out momentarily”—Hughes recovered himself and then asked the most famous woman in the world if she’d like to help him. She would. Hughes cut off the dirty bandages, cleaned the sores, and applied the Neosporin, and Mother Teresa replaced the bandages and fastened each with a butterfly clip.

And here’s where the story gets interesting.

Hughes noticed that Mother Teresa had done it wrong. She had put the butterfly clasp upside down on the bandage. “The elderly gent we were serving walked a short distance away as my realization sunk in. I had just seen Mother Teresa make a mistake.”

Hughes had to make a quick and extremely awkward decision. “Do you tell Martin Luther King, Jr., that he’s made a grammatical mistake in the pulpit? Do you call Michael Jordan’s attention to this traveling violation on his way to a thunderous dunk? Should I tell Mother Teresa, Nobel laureate, destined for sainthood, that she made a mistake in helping the poor?”

Hughes brought the man back and, pointing at the faulty clasp, told the saint that unless it was fixed, it would fall off. He told her she had put it on wrong.

“That world famous face—Mother Teresa’s face—looked at what I was pointing to, listened to what I said, paused for several pregnant moments, and considered. My mind raced, telling me I must be wrong. She said, quietly, one word: ‘Shoot.’ Then she fixed the problem with the clasp.”

Nothing about that story in any way diminishes the greatness of Mother Teresa; in fact, the story does rather the opposite. Hughes later wrote that the “images of the super-duper spirituality star were things in my mind, nothing more. The humble, human reality of who she was was greater than the media image, greater than the projections of the imagination.”

The lesson here: even the most famous, most admired people in the world are, ultimately, human and fallible. George Washington lost battles; Abe Lincoln committed a series of political blunders; Brett Favre threw a lot of interceptions. The nitpickers of life will seize on the negative, maybe because it makes them more comfortable with their own mediocrity, but they get it backwards. The failings of the heroes are not grounds for cynicism; they remind us how extraordinary it is that ordinary people—parents, teachers, role models—do such extraordinary things.