For a long while, it seemed like every self-help and business improvement book or blog was all about striving for perfection. “Good is the enemy of perfect” trumpeted many books, self-help gurus and aspiring CEOs. But in the last few years, with more attention paid to mental health, this long held mantra is cracking. After all, is anyone really perfect and is it even sustainable? Is it even desirable to strive for perfection?
We have been told for a long time that never being satisfied and always striving for more is critical to get anywhere in the world and be successful. But there is a growing pushback towards this idea: what is success? What does it mean for the individual and for a community as a whole? And if we are all supposed to be striving for more, why are rates of burn-out among employees so high and anxiety and depression worse than ever?
Maybe we are striving in the wrong direction.
Content With the Here and Now
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh offers up a different notion of success: that of being content with how your life is unfolding, “finding happiness in your work and life, in the here and now.” This doesn’t mean that you can’t keep striving for other things, but it means your attention shouldn’t be completely bound up in some intangible, what-if future, but instead on where you are now and being happy with good enough.
Does this lead to people stagnating? Actually, no; in most cases, being focused on where you are and meeting your needs in that moment, is the path to improvement.
Take losing weight. (Yeah, it’s post New Years and it’s still on many peoples’ minds!). Diets such as low carb, high carb, Atkins, intermittent fasting, etc etc all promise to let you lose weight, but when we spend all our time chasing a fad diet and not appreciating where we are, we end up burning out on the diet. Instead, it’s about making smaller, sustainable lifestyle choices that lead to greater success and longevity of health, rather than yo-yoing. A mindset of being content with where you are and then making smaller choices to improve improves confidence and releases pressure. As a weight loss influencer says: “Eat what you want, add what you need,” as a path to eating healthier rather than cutting out everything you crave like chips, ice cream and cookies.
In other words, we want to strive to be good enough, not perfect, not constantly pushing yourself off the cliff, but instead focusing on where you are and making those small changes towards a goal.
What Does Giving 100% Mean?
The other idea that is often tied to striving for perfection is this idea of ‘giving 100% all the time.’ But what is 100%? Some people may be able to be super productive and energetic one day and then the next day, they are tired, unfocused, and drained. Furthermore, if we are constantly pushing ourselves to do more, that crash tends to come quicker.
Instead, there has been a rethinking of ‘giving 100%’, retooling into the idea that “100%” can change day by day (and in some cases hour by hour!) Sometimes it means being really on top of things and productive; other times, it means being awake and dressed, but not really engaging. It’s about your ability to give 100% which may change day to day. And in fact, some people even say you should never try to go 100% and instead aim for more like 70 or 80% because then you can be more consistent without feeling run down.
Work With Where You Are
Another ‘meme’ moment that often comes up is the idea of imagining or working at the level where you want to be, not where you are. But this is a problem too because you’re not there yet; you’re here! And trying to act like you’re there will likely lead to frustration.
Take training for a marathon. If you try to train like you’re already running 10k’s, you’re going to be exhausted and frustrated in short order (especially if you can’t even run 1 k!). But if instead, you train where you are (running for 500 metres for example) and slowly build up over time, you’re more likely to achieve your goals without feeling terrible for not already achieving them. Or if you’re trying to lose weight, buying clothing that is four sizes too small before you’ve even begun is probably going to make you frustrated (not to mention spend money on something you may decide you don’t like in the future!)
“Acceptance does not mean passive resignation… It means taking a reading of a situation, feeling it and embracing it as completely as one can manage, however challenging or horrible it may be, and recognizing that things are as they are, independent of our liking or disliking or what it to be different.” -Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living. In other words, you have to accept where you are and who you are before you can make any changes. Getting mad at yourself for not being a director by age 30 isn’t helpful; accepting where you are in your career and looking at the next incremental step is going to lead to greater success.
It’s also of course important to be patient! Greater success comes when you give it time to grow rather than pushing for it to happen immediately. Careers take time to develop, weight takes time to lose, money takes time to save, debt takes time to pay off. Trying to go too hard, too fast will also greatly increase the chances of stress and burn out.
While it’s important to foster a mindset of growing, branching out, and developing, it’s equally important to not try to do everything all at once and expect perfection out of it. Instead of thinking that good enough is the enemy of perfection, maybe good enough is just good enough. We don’t need to be always running after the next thing, splitting our attention in several ways, or trying to get things finished as quickly as possible. It’s just as important to slow down and pay attention to where we are and what’s around us and then figure out our changes. At the very least, it’s a lot less stressful!
So perhaps a good resolution for 2025 should be to slow down, be present, meet ourselves where we are at, and be proud of how far we have already come. Arguably, that’s a lot harder than constantly running after the next thing!
