Part Three: The Power of ‘Good Enough’
“I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.”
Neal Shusterman
February 2022
I knew that I would never be ‘perfect’ because perfection doesn’t exist in life (apart from sunrises), but every failure used to feel like I was getting further away from that imaginary qualification of being ‘perfect’. I was aiming for the wrong thing. I didn’t realise that every failure that I accepted and processed brought me closer to the qualification of ‘good enough’, which aside from being attainable was vastly better than ‘perfection’.
Being good enough is about being qualified at being underqualified. Approaching each day with, “I want to be kinder than I was yesterday, put into practice what I have learned from my mistakes today and expect failures tomorrow from which I can learn.”
I have lots of failures ahead of me, I know that, but I am not afraid of them, I’m ready for them. I will try to avoid them but when they inevitably come, I will accept any heartachingly painful consequences, and I will learn my lessons and forgive myself. I will become better qualified than I am now.
If you can’t forgive and accept your own failures, you won’t be able to forgive and accept the failures of those around you. That’s a pretty unhappy state to remain in.
There is a hard line to find in all of this. Failures can be really damaging and it’s not easy to forgive or accept the consequences of the actions, or the repercussions in a relationship, but a big part of love is forgiveness and grace. Community, and family, cannot thrive without these two things. Grace is giving someone what they don’t deserve, and in the worst cases it may seem like someone does not deserve a second chance or forgiveness. Being gracious with forgiveness and second chances doesn’t mean forgetting or pretending something never happened. Actions do have consequences and consequences take their own time to play out. It does mean not holding resentment or bitterness past the point where everything that can be done to amend and apologise has been done. You don’t need to have that person front and centre in your life if that’s not healthy for you, but it’s also not healthy to hold on to anger and hostility.
If you apply the ‘good enough’ qualification to everything then you stop expecting and seeking perfection, which means you reduce your risk of disappointment and stress and you allow yourself, and everyone around you, to be human: flawed and wonderful, all at the same time.
When we accept that everyone is completely unqualified, just like us, and we take them off their pedestals then we can look them in the eye and see that they are their own complicated, beautiful, tangled self, and that’s good enough.
The apology cannot be perfect, and your self-flagellation shouldn’t last forever. Endeavour to forgive yourself and forgive others. I’ve been told it’s remarkably freeing.
One of my favourite podcasts is How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I listen to it religiously. The opening line is “learning how to fail, actually means learning how to succeed better”.
Or, in my words: accepting that you will fail and are totally unqualified for almost everything you do, leads you closer each day to becoming MORE qualified than you were yesterday and gives you increased grace and patience to deal with other people’s failings too.
The only failures you should fear are the ones you don’t choose to learn from, and the only qualification you need is ‘good enough’.