George McGowan lies in bed at night visualizing parkour lines. The next day at the spot, he works to make the physical reality match the mental image exactly. His training partners know his superpower: “it’s always one more.” Fifty attempts later, sometimes a hundred, he finally gets the clip that satisfies him. He describes the joy when a line comes together perfectly: “that is literally the reason I’m so passionate about it.”

David Wilson advocates for the opposite approach: “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly and playfully.” He argues that we become “addicted to competence,” wrapping our identities up in particular skill sets and losing the capacity to take ourselves less seriously. For Wilson, curiosity and playfulness trump perfection. The goal isn’t mastery measured by flawless execution—it’s engagement measured by sustained interest and compassion toward yourself.

These aren’t just different training philosophies. They represent fundamentally different answers to what movement practice is actually for.

McGowan’s perfectionism serves a specific function. He’s not grinding through repetitions to prove something to others or to accumulate followers. When asked if his “one more” approach bothers his training partners, he acknowledges it probably does, but adds: “I’m doing the line because it will make me happy.” The satisfaction comes from internal alignment—the feeling matching the vision. The clip at the end is “just a bonus.”

This matters because McGowan isn’t chasing external validation disguised as perfection. He’s pursuing an aesthetic experience that requires precision to achieve. When he describes the moment of getting it right—”oh my that was the perfect connection. It couldn’t have been any better”—he’s describing a specific feeling that only emerges from that level of execution. You can’t get there by doing it badly. The pursuit of precision creates access to an experience unavailable through casual engagement.

Wilson’s playfulness serves a different function entirely. He came to movement practice in his fifties, without an athletic background. His anti-ageism advocacy emphasizes how cultural narratives about aging create movement phobia—people stop trying things because they’re “too old to learn” or might get hurt. In this context, perfectionism becomes a barrier. If movement practice requires fifty attempts to achieve satisfaction, most people simply won’t start. And if they do start, the gap between their current capacity and their imagined ideal will crush them.

If I can be more compassionate toward myself, I can let go of this addiction to competence and just let myself try and suck.

Wilson’s “do it badly” philosophy specifically counters the competence addiction that prevents engagement. It’s permission to inhabit the beginner’s mind without shame. But this philosophy rests on a particular premise: that the value of movement practice comes from showing up, from the act of moving itself, not from achieving any particular standard of execution.

Here’s the complication: both approaches are correct for their practitioners, but neither translates cleanly to the other’s context.

McGowan’s perfectionism works because he already has the base capacity. He’s not attempting fifty variations of a movement he can’t do—he’s refining variations of something he can already execute. The joy he describes requires competence as a foundation. You can’t experience “the perfect connection” if you’re still struggling with basic control. His approach assumes you’ve already crossed the threshold where refinement becomes meaningful.

Wilson’s playfulness works as an entry point but eventually hits limits. You can explore movement badly and playfully for a long time, building capacity and reducing fear. But at some point, if you want access to certain experiences—the feeling McGowan describes of a line flowing exactly as imagined—you need to develop actual skill. Playful exploration alone doesn’t create the precision required for those experiences.

The age dimension matters here more than either person explicitly acknowledges. McGowan trained with peers who modeled perfectionism from the start. He absorbed a standard of “almost never satisfied with the end result unless it was absolutely perfect” during his formative training years. This created neural pathways where satisfaction couples with precision. Wilson came to movement in his fifties, which means he’s building new pathways in a nervous system shaped by decades of other priorities. His advocacy for playfulness isn’t just philosophical—it’s pragmatic. The perfectionist pathway might not be accessible when you start late.

But Wilson’s philosophy also contains an assumption worth examining: that older practitioners need permission to be bad more than they need tools for getting better. This frames aging as inevitably moving away from capacity rather than potentially moving toward different capacities. Some older practitioners do want to pursue excellence, do want the feeling McGowan describes. Telling them to “do it badly” might feel like being told to accept limitation rather than explore possibility.

The real tension isn’t between perfectionism and playfulness. It’s between two different definitions of what makes movement practice meaningful. McGowan’s fifty attempts assume meaning emerges from achieving a specific experiential quality that requires precision. Wilson’s philosophy assumes meaning emerges from the act of moving itself, regardless of execution quality.

Neither is wrong. But treating them as universally applicable creates problems. McGowan’s approach applied to beginners or older adults re-entering movement creates discouragement and shame. Wilson’s approach applied to someone seeking specific aesthetic or performative experiences denies them the tools to achieve those experiences.

What gets lost when we treat either approach as the template: the recognition that what movement practice is “for” changes based on where you are, what you want, and what you’ve already built. The beginner needs permission to suck. The intermediate practitioner needs tools for refinement. The person re-entering movement after decades needs both—permission to start wherever they are, and acknowledgment that they might eventually want more than playful exploration.

McGowan’s “one more” and Wilson’s “do it badly” aren’t opposing philosophies needing reconciliation. They’re context-specific strategies that work for different people at different times pursuing different aims. The error is assuming your strategy should be everyone’s strategy.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episodes “Freerunning with George McGowan” (published May 13, 2024) and “Curiosity with David Wilson” (published May 19, 2025).