“Good Enough” Is Underrated

As a recovering perfectionist, I’ve had to change my relationship with “good enough.”

I used to believe that “good enough” didn’t exist. There was perfect or close-to-perfect and that was all that mattered. “Good enough” seemed downright mediocre and self-loathing. Why would anyone do something at a “good enough” level?

But at my last job, I started to learn something. Trying to do all my work at near-perfect levels wasn’t getting me anywhere. It was getting me plenty of stress, and in a weird way it was actually decreasing my work performance.

See, the thing was, I was putting too much energy into work assignments, completing them in a way that I thought was high quality but in actuality wasn’t adding much value to the completed work.

I began to see it this way: I always wanted to operate at a 9 or a 10. But in most instances, a 6 or a 7 was perfectly fine. Going those extra few points was really just draining my energy and making it less likely that things were getting done in a timely fashion.

Working on something until it was “good enough” and then getting it out the door saved me a lot of stress and kept my work moving along. “Good enough” was a much better option than close-to-perfect.

In my writing and publishing it’s the same thing. Writing a “good enough” blog post every week is better than writing a close-to-perfect one every once in a while. Writing a “good enough” story for my newsletter every month is way better than not sending one at all because the story isn’t perfect. Publishing a book at a “good enough” level is much better than not publishing at all, because there will be readers who will be happy I shared rather than holding back, and because in self-publishing I can change just about anything at anytime, so I can always improve on it.

Ultimately, doing things at a “good enough” level allows me to show up on a regular basis, and I believe that showing up is more important than doing everything perfectly.

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Amanda Linehan is the author of North, about a young woman on the run from her past, the law and an old adversary out to get her. Her newest release is Bored To Death: A Vampire Thriller, about a 300-year-old vampire trying to restore the balance between life and death. She has published five novels. Get a free short story every month when you sign up for her newsletter.