Is Not Holding Yourself Back… Holding You Back?

If you’ve spent your entire life aiming for perfection, allowing yourself to let things be “good enough” will probably feel like holding yourself back.

But not giving everything your all isn’t laziness. It’s a restraint that preserves your energy and mental health. If you give a project your all then you have nothing left over. How can you use what you’ve learned to improve if you have no gas left in the tank? By the time you’re ready to go “all in” again you’ll have lost momentum and forgotten much of what you learned.

So don’t beat yourself up when you don’t do your “best” work every time. That’s not how being human works. As tempting as it is to imagine we’re making a choice between “perfect” and “good enough”, often the choice is between “perfect” and “actually doable and sustainable”. And though we will never get to 100% faultless perfection (which sounds like it lacks personality anyway), it is through sustained doing that we get incrementally better.