Can focusing too much on mastery cause perfectionism and stress in my life?

Lately I have been having a lot of new things happening in my career and I have been trying my best to be the best I can be. One of my things in life has always been trying to be the best at things in life. To master my life as it were. This is considered a hypo-agency trait and a very male one. In fact, on this metric I could almost be considered hyper-masculine in how obsessed with mastery and being the best I can be.

Sometimes though being too obsessed with being the best and with mastery can cause stress. When you are not the master of your world and your skills. When you try the best to be the best and never seem to make it to where you want to be. When you try you really try, but, just do not reach that peak and that epoch you are trying to climb. Thinking you should be better. You should be able to be better than you are. That you are not meeting your potential.

You try and try, keep trying and try to do all you can. However, you never quite make it to where you want to be. You work yourself to the bone. The nose to the grindstone. You work and work. You work you try your all. You do all the research and you try to get to your goal. However, the goal keeps slipping away from you. Which makes you feel like you are not meeting the potential you could. Which causes stress over not going good enough for the world.

I know what this is like and I sometimes wonder if I am trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good. If by being so concerned about not being the best I am missing out on being the good or the great at something. This absolutely plays into my stress over work in the passed couple of weeks. I wanted to be the best. To show that I can master my career as one thing I can master in my life that seems to be slipping through my fingers.

I mean I cannot master dating, have not mastered getting to sleep at a decent time nor mastered being able to get a gaggle of friends. I wanted to master so much in my life. By now I wanted to have it in the bag with men or women on a date. Mastered making friends with others. Mastered dominating my own life and being a grown ass man. Yet, I know very much am a grown ass man. I wanted to master my finances. I wanted to never be in debt again and always have money for taxis.

I never wanted to be in a place where I did not feel self-reliant or independent. Where I did not feel in charge of my life and its course. You see I need to master my own life. I need to be in charge of my life. This is my life, mine, and all mine. Thus I need to be living the life that is rationally best for me and lately I am questioning if that is the life I am leading. Before anyone mentions it; NO my orientation has nothing to do with it.

This is about lots of things; things like constantly getting in debt. Things like my job and and am I the master of it that I thought I was. Is it really a job I even want to master anymore? Or is it time to move onto greener pastures? These questions keep going through my head as my passion for my work slowly goes out of me. Little by little like grains of the sands of time. Is this all causing me to be way more stressed than I should be?

I know that working hard is important in life. I know that mastery is important in ones life, but, have I been too focused on getting everything just right? Not a single move, not a single word or action out of step with what is needed to get the result I am looking for. Not meeting my goals feeling like there is just some simple thing I made a stupid mistake with. That if I just did a different way I would get the results I wanted. Yet, life is not always that simple. So much gets in ones way.
 
I am thinking maybe I am concentrating too much on being the best. Maybe I should worry more about being me than the best of the best. Yet, I do not want to be a nothing either, a 0, zilch that is not good at anything. That has not mastered something; that does not have my niche. I do not want to be at the bottom of the heap even if I will never be at the top. I really need to learn that maybe I cannot have it all. Mastering everything in life like I would want because there is just too much random shit that I will be going through.

This recent stuff with my job being a prime example of this. Sometimes I just cannot be the best not without lots of practice. I mean maybe my best will require more work. Or maybe I am not being my best because the drive to be is muted by the lack of passion about it. Either way I need to distress and quit worrying about being the best man for the job. The best date, the best friend, the greatest guy. Being the master of my universe. The ruler of my world. Life happens and sometimes I just need to live with it.