Why This Obsession With Doing Our Best?

Is good enough… good enough? Do we even have a choice when it comes to deciding between good enough and our best?

Image by 3D Animation Production Company

I can remember feeling I didn’t have to do my best as much as I can remember not liking chocolate. I just can’t. It’s part of me, of who I am. Either I was born like this or I was raised like this, but I can’t imagine a version of myself that could ever be satisfied with good enough.

Good enough is everywhere. I’ve seen it in classmates and workmates. In a certain way, good enough is what the industrial education system teaches us: pass the exam, reach that 50%, qualify. It is culturally ingrained in us, too. It pays just to do enough to pass muster: if the standard is well below our capabilities, we may save energy that we can use for our pursuits or leisure. Moreover, I’ve even been punished for doing more than enough: either because I got distracted by a particularly alluring rabbit hole or because I failed to constrain my answer to the question at hand.

Is good enough good enough, though? I don’t think so. Admittedly, it can be intelligent to focus only the necessary attention to carry on doing what we need to do. Following certain rules, for instance, is the simplest and fastest way to get on with the work we really want to do. We might scorn some of these rules, we might feel above them, but observing them is often the smartest course of action in order not to let them get in the way.

Personally, my only problem with observing the rules is the possibility of falling into the trap of believing the rules are always right. I see many make this mistake. We may believe that rules are rules for a reason and that that is enough to abide by them. What do we know? Who are we to challenge them? Well, it might not be such a bad idea to inspect each rule that may become an obstacle and come up with our own analysis and judgement of it. Many rules make a lot of sense; depending on where we live, I’d go as far as to say that most of them do. We, as a society, established them for a reason. Some simply don’t; believe it or not, in some places and in certain periods, as many as most of them might be utterly ridiculous.