The belief that hurts high achievers

Many of my clients struggle with the idea of being “good enough”, or judging something or someone else as good enough.

They tend to have an all-or-nothing perfectionist mindset. For them, “good enough” is the equivalent of exceptional, ideal and perfectly flawless. Anything less is considered a failure or a disappointment.

They believe this is a helpful mindset to have, that it pushes them to greatness and motivates them to try their best. It’s a bizarre thing to believe, given that this mindset causes them endless misery, making their successes impossible to enjoy (they could always be better), and causing them to avoid anything that looks too difficult to excel at immediately.

I sympathise with them deeply, because for most of my life I was ruled by this impossible expectation as well. And like them, it simply didn’t occur to me that there might be an alternative and better way to view the world.

What is good enough?

Despite the casual sound of the phrase “good enough”, for high achievers and perfectionists this is actually a nearly impossibly high standard.

To feel like something was good enough requires that they see it as near-perfect, impossible to improve on, and so finally they can enjoy the relief of feeling like they can briefly rest for once. But this is a rare experience.

The problem with a high standard is our imagination. There is no level of achievement that we cannot imagine an improvement on.

Got the best score in the class? Yeah but it still wasn’t 100%. Finished first in the running race? Yeah but you didn’t beat the record. Scored a date with the girl of your dreams? Yeah but she’s been with other guys who are more handsome than you.

When good enough is really code for “the best” — an exceptional event that cannot be beaten — even the highest achievers actually feel like they’re constantly losing.

Ironically, these people describe not constantly being the best at everything as being “not good enough”.

The real good enough

Think about the phrase for a second:

Good.

Enough.

When viewed logically, we get a clear sense of a minimum standard, not a maximum. If something is good enough, then by definition there must be higher levels of performance available. There must be lower levels too, whereby the goal has not been achieved.

So good enough is NOT the same as “the best” or “exceptional” or “perfect”. Those terms describe states far beyond good enough.

Good enough really describes the minimum possible standard to achieve a goal of some kind. Anything more than good enough is essentially optional, and — as we’ll discuss soon — more effort may actually be harmful, or at least pointless.

Most perfectionists struggle because they lose sight of the goal. Rather than measuring if they’ve achieved the minimum standard required to meet the criteria of the goal, they shift the goal to become “always better”, which is of course impossible to achieve.

If a college student gets grades that only just pass, they end up getting rewarded with the exact same degree as the over-achiever who scored straight-A’s. Good enough at university essentially gets the same result as exceptional effort does.

Diminishing returns

At some point, as you increase effort you will get to a place where you leverage fewer returns on your investment.

If I work out three times per week, I will achieve a lot of gains for my health. However, if I work out six times per week, I don’t achieve double the gains. I will only receive marginally more returns than the more casual regime. Now, this might matter if I’m a competing body-builder or an Olympic athlete, but as an average person I’m essentially just wasting time with the extra gym sessions.

Good enough is not just the point where the goal has been achieved, it’s also often the point where going beyond with extra effort is simply not worthwhile.

Taking five minutes to write an email is probably going to create a message that’s equally effective and understandable as an email that takes 20 minutes to get perfect. You gain very little extra benefit from those additional 15 minutes.

Perfectionism is just a euphemism for wasted time and effort. Sure, there are a few areas of life where it’s worthwhile to put in the extra effort, but these are rare.

Most “perfectionists” put in this extra effort with all their tasks, instead of discriminating for one or two mastery topics and allowing the rest to be just good enough. Ironically, they end up creating mediocre results all round because they’re spread too thin.

Good enough is not just the minimum effort, it’s also the maximum efficiency point. Up until this point, you are getting great return on your investment — achieving the most output with the least amount of input. More input after this point is clearly less efficient, because if nothing else the goal has already been achieved.

You get paid the same doing free overtime, and are probably equally likely to get a promotion, than the guy who just does a great job in the normal working hours.

But that’s not all. Not only are you exceeding the maximum efficiency point, you’re starting to risk causing more harm than good…

Overdoing it

There’s one thing nearly all my tattoos have in common: I took the image too far. There was a point during the design where it was good enough, but perfectionism pushed me to add more until I pretty much ruined it! My skin covered is a tapestry that reminds me to quit while I’m ahead or else I’ll regret it.

A lot of gym rats spend many hours per day working out. But scientifically speaking, they could get their workout done to maximum efficiency within 15–20 minutes per day, just a few days per week. This extra time they spend might be more than just wasted effort — they are now excessively injuring themselves and causing inflammation. Ironically, the reason a lot of wannabe body-builders are frustrated with their slow progress is because they do too much!

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen someone talk their crush out of being attracted to them. Their inability to know when to stop talking and stop messaging is painful to watch. In love, as in many things, less is often more.

I used to work 90 hour weeks when I first started my business. Years later, I was able to calculate that about 30 of those hours were actually useful. The other 60 were not only wasted time, but they drained and exhausted me, leaving me less capable as a coach.

In your attempt to reach the end of the rainbow and feel good enough, you often overdo it and end up hurting yourself. Either you overdo the task at hand, like working a tattoo design too much until it sucks, or you compromise other areas of your life, like missing out on quality time with your children because you don’t leave the office.

Stop patting yourself on the back for going “the extra mile”. You’re being inefficient, unproductive, and harming yourself.

High performance doesn’t mean doing a lot, or doing everything to the extreme. High performance is about efficiency — getting the most from the least effort, while doing as little harm as possible.

In other words, if you truly want to think of yourself as a high performer, you’re going to have to learn restraint.

Leverage

Essentialism describes using leverage to create as much helpful output as possible while doing as little input as possible. In other words, “Doing less, better.”

Rather than aiming for perfection or impressiveness, start thinking about trying to achieve goals the way an AI machine would — taking the shortest possible path to create the desired outcome and no more.

Doing it all is not impressive because anyone can do that. Anyone can push themselves to the max and grind hard and seek approval from others. There’s nothing special about being a perfectionist. When’s the last time you met someone who didn’t think of themselves as one?

A truly impressive high performer is the one who makes achieving goals look effortless. He’s the one who’s getting all the important things done and yet has plenty of energy and spare time left over afterwards. This man is intelligent, resourceful and strategic.

Leverage might look messy. Some perfectionists might say you’re cheating, or that you’re not doing things the “right way”. But if you achieve the goal with minimal effort and without causing harm, then your way is the right way, and anything else is wasted time and effort.

There are some key principles to efficiency; certain things that you must leverage to achieve goals with less effort and create a greater overall quality of life.

Decisiveness. Rather than acting on every idea and fixing every problem, an efficient person eliminates as many possibilities as they can before moving forward. Their starting position on any potential options is “NO!”. They don’t start something new unless they’re very sure it has high leverage for their quality of life. Perfectionists say Yes to every idea and try to solve every problem.

The shortest path. Most ways of doing things are inefficient — they’re just done that way because they’ve always been done that way. People work out for hours when minutes would do. People clean their own houses when they’d actually save money by hiring a cleaner (more time to increase their income). They act fake and “get to know each other” on dates when radical honesty will create deeper relationships with less effort.

Frequency beats quantity. Choosing the right frequency can reduce the effort immensely. When it comes to learning, you’ll make more progress practicing 10 mins per day than you will doing a couple of 1 hour sessions each week. Your stock portfolio only needs to be adjusted every 6–12 months. A quick call with someone once per week will sustain a friendship forever.

One last thing to keep in mind: you’re still alive.

The universe has been actively trying to kill you since the moment you were conceived. Before modern medicine, most children didn’t make it past the age of five. Diseases and injuries are just a step away.

You don’t give yourself credit for “mundane” things like eating, taking care of your hygiene, keeping your body functioning and so on. You don’t pat yourself on the back for maintaining long term friendships or putting food on the table for your family or keeping a roof over your head. Yet maybe you should congratulate yourself for surviving.

Just by being alive you must be doing good enough. There’s no other logical explanation. You’ve had to take care of yourself, and even if you’re not doing it perfectly you’re definitely doing it well enough to be alive and able to read this post.

So take it easy on yourself.

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Dan Munro

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