92 days
Good enough
Sometimes things you will read in these blogs will seem conflicting. Today may be one of them.
In an earlier blog I said to give it your best, do what you could and it would be alright. Yesterday I said that sometimes something to fill your time was a good thing and you needed to give it all you had. Today we are going to talk about something that is a bit different, good enough.
There are going to be some things in life that are worth giving your all. Some hobbies are like that, some things in school are that way. Some things you must give your all. But I will be honest here, sometimes you can't be so worried about perfection that you never finish anything. It may not all be done, but sometimes that has to be OK. The trick is to know when that is.
If we are having company and I need to clean the house but only have 3 hours to do it ,does it make sense to scrub the grout on the kitchen floor if that will take me an hour? If it is the only thing I have to do sure. If not, it is better to spend the time to get the most things done to meet the deadline knowing that if I do it all and have an hour to spare, then it may be a good time to do the long involved task.
In school you will learn this on some tests. Go through and do the ones you can do easily, leave the more complicated ones for after the easy ones are done. That way, if you run out of time you do not miss the easy ones you would have gotten right because you spent your whole time on the one that you had to work hard to work out. Life is a lot like that. If you are waiting on the perfect thing to come along, you may be waiting for a long long time. Sometimes you may have to accept that this is good enough and work to make it better than to wait forever for something that does not come.
It is like this. When I was in Junior High (1992-1994) my Dad bought us bus passes so we could get around. Sometimes, when I was waiting for the bus I would wait at the stop, for just a second see if the bus was coming, figure out if I could make it to the next stop before it did, then walk further down the route and repeat the same thing over again. What I found some days was that by the time I caught the bus, I was halfway home, but I felt that I had done something with that time instead of waiting at the same spot for 20 minutes and still getting home a the same time. Sometimes good enough is about though it is not your preference to walk, walking and when the bus gets to you it does. Sometimes that means you may get the whole way or most of the way home before the bus gets to you but I know for me, I feel more accomplished when I have done something to help myself then if I had just waited and the bus had never come.
There is one warning I have about this, know what you can call good enough and what you can't. If you are doing homework, it is better to do all of it, so you are sure you cement the concept in your brain. If you have run out of time though, it is far better to hand it in on time and not perfect then late and perfect because you never know what you will get for something you felt was perfect. The key to good enough is to balance things. When I tell you to clean your room, I am not expecting perfection, just presentable. If you are trying to impress the boss, or sell an idea, or finish crafting something that someone else will buy or want to, you will find much more success (and people will pay you more for it) if it is done right then if it is done quickly and good enough just to meet the deadline.
I bring this up because it was not something I heard growing up. I want you to do your best, but know that it is far better to put all of your energy into something that really matters (may be worth more points, etc in school) than to put all your time and energy into a little project that is not as important.
In art, or writing, or music, you get to a point where you need to be done with it. Going over it and over it is not going to make it any better, it is just going to make it worse.
-Dad
