What it Means to Be Good Enough

There’s something to be said about something being good enough.

Seth Godin talks about this. And I’m sure at least hundreds of other notable folks have too. There’s something in lots of us — I know it’s in me, and if these high-profile people are talking about it, I guess I’m not the only one — that creates this ultimatum for every project we are a part of: either we make it perfect, or we don’t share it at all.

In my case, the all-or-nothing mindset is mostly relevant to publishing. Hitting that “Post” button to share an idea with the world or that “Send” button to email someone something I’d been working on. The fear of an idea not being effectively communicated, or not being written well or thought out enough stands in the way of lots of ideas being shared with the broader public.

But check this out.

It’s like this: have you ever been talking to a friend about something you read or someone you heard about, but you can’t remember the person’s name? You have enough of a vague idea of how it sounded, and you might mumble through two or three variations before the other person gets what you were trying to say, and fills in the blank with the name, leading to a sigh of relief on your part!

And then the conversation continues on and you get to the same place as if you had recalled and pronounced it right in the first place. So you detour the conversation for 10 seconds together, you brainstorm the name, you get there, and then you carry on as you originally intended.

I can only aspire to that kind of good enough in sharing my ideas. Though my ideas definitively won’t always be communicated perfectly or in the most creative way I had envisioned, my hope is that they’ll be good enough that the reader can get to the same place I originally intended, maybe after a slight detour or pondering.

This is a collection of most likely incomplete, imperfect thoughts that I still think are worth sharing. If I wait for perfect, nothing will ever get done.