I'm a huge proponent of good enough. At age six when told to clean my room: shove every last thing under the bed. Good enough. At age sixteen when taking a geometry test: B minus. Good enough. Last month when cutting a baseboard to install in the kitchen: "I can fill in that unsightly gap with some caulk." Good enough. My life is so steeped in the philosophy of good enough, I'm considering commissioning a legs-only replica of Michelangelo's David with a placard that reads "This'll Do".
Some might view the phrase Good Enough as the calling card of underachievers. And to those people, I say, "well...no shit." But despite my best efforts to slack off my whole life, I somehow managed to keep making progress. How this happened is probably debatable, but it all starts with objectives. What's the ultimate vision for this activity? What does its final form look like? This fundamental question bifurcates what I do into one of two categories: the lifelong pursuit or the ad-hoc fix. It begins as a simple choice. Here I stand, lording over a thing that has to be done. The choice isn't whether or not to do the thing. If it didn't absolutely have to be done, I wouldn't be standing here at all. I'm not sure where I'd be, but at the very least you can be sure I'd be sitting, not standing. Anyway, the choice isn't whether or not to do the thing. The choice is something like this: "do I wish to be great at doing this thing and other things like it in the future, or do I need to simply put a tourniquet on it so it doesn't bleed to death right here on my white carpet?" Most things in my life fall into the latter category. These ad-hoc tasks are more binary and objective than lifelong pursuits. The tire either has enough air or it doesn't.
It doesn't escape me that the spectrum for interpretation of what constitutes good enough is as varied as humankind itself. The superstar's bare minimum is sometimes the average Joe's maximum attack, so the entire premise must be scoped to the individual. It is useful, however, to glean clues about what's possible by looking at what others have already achieved, and I'll explore this a bit later.
I played sports when I was in high school. When the final class bell rang for the day, the more dedicated athletes went to the locker room, got changed, and hit the gym. I, on the other hand, went home, grabbed some pretzels out of the pantry, poured a tall glass of Diet Coke, and sat down to watch TV. Our objectives were the same. We both wanted to perform well and have fun. But I was satisfied with my existing level of play and didn't see the gym as necessary to maintain that standard. However, context is critical. Our hockey team was decent, but it was safe to assume we wouldn't contend for the championship. Plus, the program was brand new, so there was no history of expectations to live up to. But what if our team wasn't new? What if we were contenders? What if we had won the last 7 championships and the culture of excellence was already built up? What if all the coaches ever talked about was giving maximum effort? What if I had to go to the gym after school? My dreams of Diet Coke and pretzels would be dashed, that's what. This raises another interesting question. Would I even try out for that team in the first place? Looking at my lifelong pursuits reveals the answer. My lifelong plans included going to art school and the pursuit of finding a career doing something creative. They did not include the pursuit of becoming a professional athlete or even playing college sports. For my actual hockey team, the one with low expectations, my skills were good enough to make an impact and not be a burden on my teammates. For the 7-time champs, though? I'd have to make it my life's mission to improve my mind, body, and skill level to achieve the same outcome. In that scenario, my goals would be incongruous with the effort required to play hockey, leading me to find something else to do for fun.
It's easy to justify these decisions with hindsight because the path between then and now is known. If years later I uncovered a deep passion for hockey and pursued a career in the sport, I might regret not pushing myself to see how far I could have taken my playing career. This shines a spotlight on the importance of establishing a theme to work towards. My level of effort is directly tied to the likelihood it will move the needle toward my theme. I hesitate to use the word goal because a goal has an end. If my goal is to have a career in the Arts, what happens if I achieve it? The pursuit is over and I have to think of a new goal or risk getting lost. When stated as a goal, it's also unclear what steps I need to take to even manifest it. If instead, I pursue a theme of "creating outstanding work, regardless of the medium", a system emerges whose outcome is at least a career in the Arts. In that system, the steps are more clear: create something outstanding every day. Being good enough becomes a simple question of sticking to the theme. If I fail, my system picks up the next day and I can try again. If I'm goal-oriented, it's extremely hard to place whether or not what I'm doing will prove good enough in the long run to achieve it. And if I ultimately fail, I may have spent decades pursuing something that will never happen. It'd be nice to avoid that.
"Create outstanding work, regardless of the medium." Outstanding is a subjective word. Its meaning relies entirely on a comparison. What does it "stand out" against, exactly? This is one of the few times comparing myself to others is more useful than destructive, but it requires a very specific frame of mind. It's less about comparing my current skill to the other person and more about opening my eyes to what a dedicated human being can do in the pursuit of excellence. I might think my work is amazing and it may be the best thing I've ever created, but knowing what's possible by observing others tempers my ego and places me more accurately on the universal scale of skill. In performing this exercise, I also need to accept the fact that despite my best efforts, there is an untouchable zone of skill I won't reach. I will never paint a portrait as sublime as those of John Singer Sargent, but knowing someone is that good reminds me I have a long way to go. I trust in my system to get me as close as my years will allow, and every time I check my box for the day, my good enough gets a little better.