Message to Myself: Practise the Art of “Good Enough”
Just publicly giving a pep talk to my little inner perfectionist. Maybe somebody else’s little inner perfectionist could use it too…
Hey, me!
Who, me?
Yes, me! Listen up, dude. We need to talk.
I read your idea notebook from the last year. Do you realise you’ve been renovating your webpage since June, but never quite published it because you’re still not 100% sure about the tagline?
Do you realise there are at least 10 very doable and cool ideas in there that you felt need to “marinate a bit more because they’re not quite perfect yet”?
Do you realise that you have 8 articles in the backlog since September…2021? Not that there was no time or will to finish them. But you felt they “wouldn’t quite make the impact you wanted them to”.
If you don’t recall all that stuff, you surely recall that you spent one hour writing your most recent email, to be sure that it “conveys the true essence of what you wanted to say”.
Now don’t get me wrong. Your drive for perfection is admirable, okay? And yes, I get it, you’re an entrepreneur and your business is deeply personal to you. And heck, some ideas really do need to marinate before their time comes. That’s all true.
Here comes the but…
But, I know you’re not really at peace with that. You’re a slave of your perfectionism.
It frustrates you that the webpage is still not updated and that, honestly, you haven’t really moved very far in that direction. It frustrates you when you finally do publish an article and, well, most people just don’t seem to give as much of a shit about it as you expected, given how perfect it was (according to you). And it frustrates you when 2 hours have gone by and all you’ve done is written a few emails, to most of which you get the same response as if you had written them in half an hour. Okay, well, there’s no way to really know that, but it’s probably true.
What’s stopping you is not lack of quality. It’s fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of not looking good. Fear of performing below your best. It’s important you distinguish fear from a genuine feeling of not good enough.
Striving for perfection is what drives you, but it must be accompanied by awareness that you never really achieve it. The perfection lies in the path toward perfection.
Wow, I even impressed myself with that last piece of wisdom…
Anyways, you need to practise the art of saying “It’s good enough”. Say it with me.
It’s good enough.
Yes, it’s uncomfortable when you do it. Yes, you’ll make more mistakes. But you’ll at least make more of your ideas a reality. Maybe not THE reality that you envisioned in your head. But at least A reality.
And you’ll have more time left.
There, I turned my internal dialogue into a blog post. It’s not perfect. But it’s a blog post now, not just an internal dialogue. And it took less than half an hour, instead of 3 months.
Cheerio, and may the 2023 be with you!
