You might consider this: The listener’s context will change how they perceive the music, and hence what you need to do as a musician to convey musically.
Someone listening to a recording on headphones will be tuned to just the sound itself. And as such, one way to approach that as a musician is to spend the time to refining the tracks. Multiple takes, careful EQ, subtle mixing choices, mastering… all go into it because the listener will hear it.
On the other hand, an audience member at a live performance generally has different stance with respect to the music: The sense of “now” is heightened, the social aspect of deliberate listening (or dancing) with others, and auditory experience is different (and generally much more forgiving). As a musician, this means that the subtle EQ choice isn’t going to come through much - whereas playing to the feelings of the group will. The boldness of your performance pushing the music (bolder… more ambient… faster… slower… whatever) will be more in the audience’s mind - and imperfections (or, gasp, wrong notes, mistakes…) will often hardly register.
Of course, I’ve drawn two extremes - a live concert in a shushed concert hall has a different vibe (and far different audience expectation), than an experimental music night at a warehouse. Listening on high end headphones in the livingroom is different than the background music at a dinner party.
In summary - If you want to perform your music live - you should reconsider your concept of “perfect”. Think about the context in which you’ll be playing live, and the way the audience will be approaching the act of listening. “Perfect” for that context is quite different than “perfect” in your studio.
