101. Good Enough Can Be Pretty Good

Done is better than perfect. That’s what I’m here to tell you, and there’s a simple reason for it that you already know.

Perfect doesn’t happen.

As evidenced by the amount of people I hear talking about it, Christmas is coming. Much of the chatter is about getting some shopping done early. I’m all for it, but here’s where people go wrong every year. They get all their shopping done by November so they can relax in December, except December comes around and they continue shopping.

Insisting on finding something better is a major problem when it comes to things like Christmas shopping, but it also relates to other things like when I was a realtor and home buyers would look for years for the perfect home only to end up paying more for a worse house than they originally looked at. Or when the aspiring entrepreneur spends countless hours designing their logo before they’ve ever made a sale. Or when the expecting first time parents spend the week before the due date deciding what shade of blue to paint the baby’s room and then the baby comes early and the paint doesn’t get done for the next 18 years.

Here’s a phrase we could all practice: good enough.

Imagine how much more we could all do if instead of obsessively searching for perfection, we got comfortable with good enough. Believe me, I’m preaching to the choir here. I’m as much a perfectionist as anyone so I know how much of a problem it can be.

At the end of the day, whatever we’re working on won’t be perfect. There will always be a better house, a more sentimental Christmas gift, a better deal or opportunity, but we can’t afford to keep looking for it.

Nothing is permanent, so if the cups you order online aren’t as good as the ones you wish you got instead, you can always get the other ones next time. In the meantime, at least you don’t have to worry about not having cups.

There are way too many things lobbying for our attention to give too much to things that can be done and over with. Whatever space in your mind that you give something, that’s how much space it will take up. We’ll think on it, spend time on it and worry about it until we move on. We’ve got to move on.

Big problems don’t get solved because small decisions take up too much space. Take a page out of Richard Carlson’s book and “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”. And here’s the thing, it’s all small stuff.

On the other hand, you might be wondering about the things that really should be taking priority and thoroughly completed regardless of how long it takes. Some things need a serious investment of time, and some things really do need to be as near perfect as they possibly can be. That being the case, we need to be very in tune with recognizing those things.

Again, it will come back to priorities, or further, perhaps values. What’s valuable enough to command large chunks of your time? There’s only so much, so we can’t give a lot of time to everything. Therefore, recognizing something important when you see it is paramount to allocations. When time is given to one thing, time for something else is taken away. Be careful what you say yes to.

Is it more beneficial to spend a lot of time on one thing to make sure it’s perfect? Or to do many things without the same level of care? Naturally, it depends, but from where I’m sitting, it seems as if we could benefit more from doing more. To do more things means less consideration can be given to each thing.

To put this another way, is it better to be extremely good at one thing? Or to be kind of good at many things? I pick the latter, and I do so as someone who places an extremely high value on work ethic and doing your best.

Spending less time on something does not mean spending less effort. I could spend weeks writing this blog on this topic and it would end up much better than the one you’re reading now, but I’ve got another topic to write about next week. Right now, I’m not willing to spend weeks on a single blog, but it doesn’t mean I’m not trying to make this the best I can. There’s an amount of time I’m willing to commit to this task, and I will do the best I possibly can with this task in that time, but when the time is up, I’m moving on. What’s done is good enough. I’ve got other things to do, and if I spend too much time doing this, something else will suffer.

However, I’m sure you recognize the flaw in this approach too. You won’t reach the full potential of something until you have laser focus on it. Spreading yourself over a few things will leave those few things short of what they could be if you focused on one. That’s why I’m not a realtor anymore. To be any good at it, I would’ve had to commit a lot more time to it, which I wasn’t willing to do. Just like to grow the audience for this blog and make it 10 times better, I would have to spend a lot more time on it. Until I do, it is what it is.

For me, for now, that’s good enough.

So now ask yourself, do you need to be spending as much time as you are on certain tasks? Or can you free yourself of them and say good enough? If you’re like a lot of folks I talk to, what you wish you spent more time on is being neglected because you’re unwilling to say good enough on other tasks.

Take inventory on what you’ve been working on. Can you say good enough and move on with your life? Or is it important enough to double down and make it even better? There is no correct answer, but it’s a question we should be asking ourselves when it seems we’ve been working on something a while.

— Cody

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See you next Thursday.

Interested in chatting in person over a couple steaming cups? Send me a text!