Something I touched on in the last essay that I want to expand upon…

I hold a very high bar of what is considered good enough… and it’s an impediment to my personal and business growth.

Not totally surprising—as a kid I could come home from school with a 95% test score and my dad’s response was consistently “what happened to the other 5%”? He was absolutely saying it in jest… but ever a true word is said in jest. I picked up on some level of truth underlying it.

Perfection was a big part of what was valued in my house growing up. And it was a subtle perfectionism, because the spoken value was that as long as you tried your best the outcome didn’t matter. But the underlying value I picked up on was that it really did. I suspect that perfectionism seeped in more, simply because it wasn’t overt.

And so the big challenge for me is in taking that incredibly high bar of what counts as good enough to exist, and lowering it. I don’t need to write a good essay, I just need to write an essay. I don’t need to speak to that stranger and have the interaction go well—simply taking the action that I want to take is the win.

Easier said than done… but 80% of change is awareness and comfort with the current state!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this essay. But, fuck it, it’s cool if you didn’t.