The “fair enough” strategy in life

It’s like you’re about to dive under the surface of the grumbling ocean of knowledge below you. Like you can pick all that fruits from the branches of the tree above you. You harvest fast, and a lot.
A LOT.
It’s overwhelming, it’s hard to keep the pace, it prevents you to think hard about things. If you have a solid background, some theory, some patterns to help you get stuff quick, or if you have that ability of being able to focus on one thing at a time, fine, you are adapted. If not, it can be so much frustrating. All those books you want to read, this subjects you want to dive into, this activities you want to try, those places you want to explore…
Even Elon Musk can’t know and control everything, may he tries very hard. Still, you have all that ambition in yourself, you try to keep up in your projects and commitments, and sometimes you just drown, or explode. You escape your responsibilities and your failures by persuading yourself that you should enjoy all the life entertainments just like any other, stopping thinking too much, until the point when you explode again, for the opposite reasons, realizing you are loosing your time for achieving your dreams and fulfilling your true potential. I’ve been through this pretty much during all my twenties.
You’re terrible with yourself, constantly judging, considering it’s never sufficient, and if one of your project is involving other people (your job?), it’s even worse, you have a responsibility to be the best for the team, and you start thinking about it full time, softly killing all your other personal initiatives considered “less important” : it can be healthy activities (sport, yoga), or passions (writing, music), and your equilibrium starts to twist toward a bad direction. You end up being unhappy, pursuing an endless quest of perfection for the thing you have chosen to prioritize more or less consciously. Take a breath, look at you as if you would be looking at another person, wouldn’t you prefer working with a joyful, accomplished person who is admitting his weaknesses and is working as a team to grow better? Why can’t you be that person? Because of this inner judge inside you… Here a possible recipe to stop listening to him: adopt the “fair enough” strategy, trust yourself more, use the opinion and feedback of the people around you as a reference instead. Reduce your goals, at least split them in more realistic and concrete purposes, tangible and objectively measurable. Then you will probably start sleeping better and dedicate more time for your other ambitions and passions. Even very positive people often are far less positive with themselves. I have this feeling that being able to honestly treat yourself the same way you treat others (and inversely) is the path toward more wisdom and peace.
Think a minute about the foundation of life, this organic primitive that was so simple at first, it followed a simple rule : grow, explore and expand. The more it adapts, the more it lasts, can it be individually or as a group. Do you see how much pretension we can have? Trying to control everything, implicitly asserting that us as individual conscious human beings can be better for ourselves than the ancestral hazard-friendly heterogeneous Nature? Isn’t that more logical to embrace a more adventurous life, with discoveries and explorations ? Sharing experiences and knowledge with others, having the humility and wisdom of constantly asking why. We often fail during that path for sure, but we learn from it, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger right? So my advice, that I don’t follow enough, would be: don’t fear to try, jump into the unknown, follow your instinct, trust the life, trust others, grow as a life being, because time won’t wait for us.
Inspirations:
- The Four Agreements
- Elon Musk recent struggles
