Good Enough
Good Enough is not the opposite of Ambition.
“Happiness is not having what you want but wanting what you have.”
It all started with a concept of mental ambidexterity I came across during an executive education program a few weeks ago*. Defined as the ability to hold and maintain simultaneously two radically different concepts, and to be able to switch back and forth purposefully to achieve specific objectives, it puzzled me initially.
However, on second thought, it dawned on me that mental ambidexterity is nothing extraordinary. In fact, we practice it all the time.
Personal relationships? Check. “We’re walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other… We seek a steady, reliable anchor in our partner. Yet at the same time, we expect love to offer a transcendent experience that will allow us to soar beyond our ordinary lives. The challenge for modern couples lies in reconciling the need for what’s safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what’s exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.” This is a quote from Esther Perel’s book whose title says it all: “Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships”.
Design / Product Development / Entertainment / Advertisement? Check. The same tension between the familiar and the new operates here. Finding a sweet spot between the two is everything. The whole concept of “MAYA” - Most Advanced Yet Acceptable - is built on solving this tension. The concept comes from the father of modern design, Raymond Loewy. “People gravitate to products that are bold, yet instantly comprehensible… This insight has been used to explain earworms in pop music, blockbusters in movie theatres, and even the success of memes in digital media. it’s not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.” This quote is from the book “Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction” by Derek Thompson. The book is about finding this aesthetic ahas and connecting them with the right network.
Business / Entrepreneurship? Check. The most basic “contradiction” is between being optimistic about the future, and paranoid about what can go wrong on the path to it. Sometimes, one person is not enough to embody both mindsets: for example, a visionary founder needs a talented COO to execute the vision and drive the company through all the landmines. Morgan Housel has put it very nicely in “The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed and happiness”: “A mindset that can be paranoid and optimistic at the same time is hard to maintain because seeing things as black or white takes less effort than accepting nuance. But you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.”
A seeming contradiction that interested me is between Ambition and feeling Good Enough. On the surface both concepts seem mutually exclusive: ambition assumes some level of insecurity and dissatisfaction with the status quo. Yet, if we dig deeper, it’s less black and white. Good Enough and Ambition can mean a lot of different things in different contexts. The fundamental questions we will try to answer are the following:
Is “good enough” and “ambitious” a contradiction in terms? Can we be both?
How can we know when to stop?
How can we avoid stopping too early?
Those are the questions we are going to explore, defining different meanings of Good Enough.
Good Enough as the Frontier of our Influence and Control
We all know a classic distinction between the three circles:
Circles of Control, Influence and Concern
Circle of control: things within our control to change. This can vary from practical, down-to-earth things that we can change for the better, to breakthrough scientific discoveries or business ideas.
Circle of influence: we can influence the elements of this area, but we cannot control what happens there.
Circle of concern: something we cannot control or influence. We cannot change the weather. We cannot change our origin. We cannot change the laws of physics.
Intuitively, the “good enough” frontier for ambition is on the edge of the Circle of Influence. The Serenity Prayer is about knowing the difference between things we can and cannot change. The caveat is not to underestimate the size of our circle of influence. If we did, there would have never been progressing.
And even when our circles of control and influence are squeezed to the minimum, one thing we can control will always remain. It is our attitude, keeping our inner freedom and dignity. To quote Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”. Keeping one’s inner freedom and dignity is good enough whatever the external circumstances are.
Questions to ask yourself:
How can I be sure I am not underestimating the size of my circle of influence?
Am I complaining about the cards I’ve been dealt or trying to play the best possible game out of the ones I’m holding?
2. Good Enough as Self-Esteem
I find that the answer to the question of how much ambition is good enough is impossible without asking yourself two more important interlinked questions:
When I am striving for more, who am I doing it for myself or others? Am I trying to prove my worth to others?
What do I enjoy: the process (“becoming”) or the outcome (“being, having”)?
I think about it graphically in the following way. I admit it’s an oversimplification of a different life and work situations, however, it’s useful to ask oneself, which of the stories am I living right now?
Different sides of ambition and motivation (c) Arina Divo
Two different persons can have similarly successful careers with similar external signs of success, yet the one who has been doing it following her internal motivation (which can also include the joy of helping others) and enjoying the process might feel happier and more satisfied than the one who has been motivated primarily by the external validation and external signs of success. For the former, the success may come as a by-product of doing the things she loves. Her self-worth does not need external validation. For the latter, above all is the ability to acquire and demonstrate the external signs of success to prove one’s worth.
Long story short, we can be ambitious with both low and high self-esteem. The difference is how we feel having achieved the success or not. High self-esteem is simply a conviction that “I am good enough and worth love and respect for who I am and not for the external signs of my professional success.” What high self-esteem does is that it fuels our ambition primarily by the internal motivation and helps us rise more easily after inevitable failures and setbacks.
I do not know a better recipe for high self-esteem than having at least one person who loves us unconditionally. We cannot control receiving such unconditional love from others - we are lucky if we have (had) such person(s) in our life. What we can control is to give a gift of unconditional love to others, starting from our family and friends. This gift will prove invaluable for them.
Questions to ask yourself:
Who am I trying to impress and why?
Whom am I giving a gift of unconditional love?
3. Good Enough as Moderation
When external attributes of success become the goal in itself and when social comparison exacerbated by social networks is so powerful, we might find it more difficult to stop when it’s already good enough.
One of the fairy tales that accompanied my childhood was “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish” by Alexander Pushkin. One day a poor old fisherman catches a golden fish who promises to fulfil any wish if he lets her go. The man, scared by the fish’s ability to speak, lets her go without asking for anything. When he gets back to their poor hut and shares the story with his wife, the old lady gets angry and sends the fisherman back, to ask the fish for a new trough. As the fish grants this small wish, the old lady gets greedier and repeatedly sends the old man back to the sea, to ask for a new house, then for a bigger one, then for a nobility title and a bigger estate, then for becoming a tsarina. The fish grants every wish until the old lady desires to become the Ruler of the Sea and have the golden fish as her servant. The sense of enough definitely failed the fisherman’s wife. The golden fish cured her greed by returning things exactly as they had been before…
In “The Psychology of Money”, Morgan Housel tells modern tales of people who lost their sense of enough and summarises the importance of enough in a series of takeaways:
There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.
The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving: Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.
Social comparison is the problem here. The ceiling of social comparison is so high that virtually no one will ever hit it.
“Enough” is not too little. The idea of having “enough” might look like conservatism, leaving opportunity and potential on the table. I don’t think it’s right. “Enough” is realizing that the opportunity - an insatiable appetite for more - will push you to the point of regret.
There are many things never worth risking, no matter the potential gain. Reputation is invaluable. Freedom and independence are invaluable. Family and friends are invaluable. Being loved by those who you want to love you is invaluable. Happiness is invaluable. And your best shot at keeping these things is knowing when it’s time to stop taking risks that might harm them. Knowing when you have enough.
Question to ask yourself:
Am I risking invaluable things I have and need for something I don’t have and don’t need?
4. Good Enough as Not Giving Up on Our Potential
When we are mostly internally motivated to fulfill our potential, there will still be things that will prevent us from doing it. And those barriers - fear, self-sabotage, procrastination - will also be internal. So often we stop the way too early, well below discovering what we are capable of. We sell ourselves and our capabilities short.
I do not know anyone who has put it better than Steven Pressfield in “The War of Art”:
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unloved life within us. Between the two stands Resistance”.
Procrastination, rationalization, victimizing, etc - Resistance manifests itself in many various ways. We are bored, we are restless and unhappy, we feel guilty yet cannot put our finger on the source of guilt. Resistance is also fear.
“Resistance feeds on fear. We experience resistance as fear. There are serious fears: fear of failure, fear of being selfish, ridiculous, or launching into the void, fear of madness, insanity, death. They are serious fears. But they’re not the real fear. Not the master fear, the mother of all fears that’s so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don’t believe it. Fear that we will succeed.”
The barriers are within our minds, and so the only way to overcome them will be with the help of our minds - and with our actions. The solution to beat resistance? Turning Pro. What does it mean exactly?
“We show up every day.
We show up no matter what.
We are committed over a long haul
The stakes for us are high and real.
We do not over-identify with our jobs
we master the techniques of our jobs
we have a sense of humor about our jobs
we receive praise or blame in the real world.
The most important thing about art (and any other creative endeavor) is to work. Nothing else matters except showing up every day and trying. When we show up day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion, by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid.”
Overcoming resistance does not mean that we can become ANYTHING we want to be. Yet it will mean not stopping on the way to find our calling:
“We’re not born with unlimited choices. We can’t become anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become… Our job in this lifetime is to find out who we already are and become it.”
Question to ask yourself:
What if? What if I give myself (another) chance to expand my limits and find my calling?
5. Good Enough as Self-Compassion
Perfection does not exist. When you zoom in on a perfectly polished surface close enough, you will surely find rough spots. Even if in the big scheme of things we are moving in the right direction, there will be life events that will put us down. There will be hours, days, or weeks when we will simply be unable to function as our best possible selves.
It’s OK not to feel OK sometimes. Self-compassion and not being too harsh on yourself (and others, by that matter) can go a very long way. Feeling not OK will sometimes be good enough.
Recently I’ve discovered the Instagram account of Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy - a great illustration of self-compassion. I hope you’ll like it as much as I did. And that it will help you avoid being too harsh on yourself if you ever have been.
Self-compassion goes hand in hand with self-esteem. And feeling good enough and worthy not only when we are at our best.
Question to ask yourself
What can I do to feel better, instead of being too harsh on myself?
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Footnotes:
*executive education program “Leaders in the New World”, jointly organized by Women Initiative Foundation and the National University of Singapore. Among other things, it introduced the triple-A mindset that helps navigate through uncertain times, as a business leader and as a person. Prof. Virginia CHA defined this triple-A mindset as follows:
Agility: the capacity to identify and capture opportunities more quickly than rivals do.
Ambidexterity: the ability to hold and maintain simultaneously two radically different concepts, and to be able to switch back and forth purposefully to achieve specific objectives/
Antifragility: a property of systems that increase in capability to thrive as a result of stress, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.
Illustration: Unsplash.com