Good is Good Enough
No seriously, it is
A few weeks ago, I found myself fretting over a spelling error I noticed in a piece I wrote earlier this year. It’s the kind of minor flub that doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, but when I thought of making a typo in my upcoming book, I began to panic.
I pictured the scene in vivid detail: I open my box of books, take the requisite selfie, open to a random chapter, begin reading, find myself enjoying what I wrote…only to find that I said “metal heath” in the closing paragraph.
Ugh.
Doom and gloom aside, I bring up this story because of what happened next.
For whatever reason, in that moment, I thought of the blooper from Game of Thrones where a Starbucks coffee cup was left on the table in one of the scenes.
Although the coffee cup is a hilarious, anachronistic gaffe, it didn’t take away from the overall awesomeness of the show. Surely, I realized, one typo in my book wouldn’t be the end of the world.
On a whim, I posted the thought to Substack Notes, and let’s just say, it resonated:
Why did it get such a reaction? Because it hit a nerve. Although Substack Notes is mainly used by other writers who, like myself, strive for perfection, the observation speaks to a larger truth: Perfectionism makes us miserable, yet we can’t let it go.
The life of a recovering perfectionist
All my life, I’ve tried to avoid errors and mistakes. Unfortunately, that’s not how life works.
Whenever I got a question wrong on a test, messed up on a client report, or realized a flaw in my carefully constructed life plans, I took it personally and believed something was wrong with me. When this happened, it damaged my confidence and hurt my self-esteem.
This tendency only got worse when my limb-girdle muscular dystrophy symptoms began a few years later. At first, I tried to be perfect in how I responded to the weakness, carefully controlling my diet and exercise regimen. But it was futile. When the weakness advanced, I once again took it personally, like the disease was somehow my fault.
Although I eventually learned how to give myself a break (a major milestone on my metal heath….er…mental health journey), my perfectionism didn’t quite disappear. If anything, now that I’m a writer, it has come roaring back.
When I’m not careful, I get so obsessed with writing the perfect sentence that I blow past self-imposed deadlines to get the wording just right.
But deep down, I know this endless tinkering is madness. I don’t have to write the perfect post to make a positive difference. All I have to do is look to the recent past to know this is true.
Back in January, I was editing a post that needed to go out ASAP, and getting frustrated that I couldn’t get the piece to my liking. I spent forever tweaking the wording and punctuation, only to undo my changes in the next readthrough.
By early evening, I had exhausted my mental energy, and my stress level was through the roof. The piece was objectively good, but I didn’t think it was great.
Eventually, I threw my hands in the air. “What the [30-second stream of expletives] am I doing here? This is insane.”
Deep down, I knew that my readers only cared about the content, not whether a sentence was choppy or if I improperly used a semicolon. Those were minor issues that no one would remember, if they even noticed them in the first place.
So I took a deep breath, said “This is good enough,” and hit publish.
The verdict? It was one of my best-performing pieces:
But had I insisted on perfection, I’d still be editing it today.
I’d also have no hair left.
At what price perfection?
Perfection sounds enticing on paper. Who doesn’t want to ace a client presentation, make every shot you take, get the best gift ever for your significant other, or write a best-selling book?
There’s just one problem: perfection is (nearly) impossible to achieve.
It’s also unnecessary.
You can still win new client business even if you fumble over a presentation slide. You can still win the game despite missing a few shots. You can still wow your significant other even if your gift isn’t The Most Romantic Gift of All Time. And your book can still make a life-changing impact even if it doesn’t win an award or sell millions of copies.
Yet, despite the negative impact on our well-being, we continue to chase after perfection, as if being perfect will finally make us feel worthy of love, status, and respect from our peers and ourselves.
But perfectionism is a one-way ticket to misery.
Our resistance to flaws and mistakes sets us up for an inevitable crash when lofty expectations meet messy reality. And, I’ve found, if you tie your self-worth to being flawless, well, you’re not going to think too highly of yourself.
Perfectionism is unrealistic. We’re not machines; we’re humans. We tire and make decisions based on incomplete or faulty information. We have brain cramps, and mental lapses, and accidentally let Starbucks cups time-travel to the Middle Ages.
Perfectionism turns us into pressure cookers, which, ironically, makes it more likely that we’ll mess up.
Life is already hard. Why make things harder on ourselves?
Perfectionism is paralyzing
There’s another consequence of perfectionism, one that I experience whenever I struggle to hit publish: inaction.
When you’re afraid to make mistakes, you become risk-averse. Instead of putting yourself out there and maybe falling flat on your face, you decide the cost is too high and do nothing. Or you stall, refusing to act until the conditions are to your liking.
This problem can manifest in several ways. For example:
If you’re an artist, you treat every piece of art as your magnum opus, keeping it out of the public eye until it feels “perfect”. In reality, it was good enough all along, but you feared potential criticism.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you spend months crafting the perfect business plan to ensure that your product launch is a success, when the best approach would have been creating a prototype and letting customers give honest feedback.
If you’re a planner, you create decision trees with dozens of branches — even your contingencies have contingencies. Only for the plans to immediately get ruined by an unforeseen variable.
In tough times, this inaction only gets magnified:
If you’re desperate to switch jobs, you hold off until the perfect role opens up. Months pass, you’re still miserable, and you still haven’t applied anywhere.
If you need a piece of adaptive equipment to improve your walking gait, you put it off until you feel “ready.” But in waiting, you fall and get hurt.
If you need to have a painful conversation with a family member, you stall until you think of the perfect words. But the longer you wait, the worse the situation gets, until no words can make it right.
If you don’t act, you might not fail, but you also won’t succeed.
Which, in a way, is failure.
The 70% Rule
What’s the antidote to perfectionism? Imperfect action.
Recently, I read a blog post by author Oliver Burkeman, who advocates for what he calls the 70% rule: When something is 70% good enough, we should take action.
At 70%, we’re most of the way there; the remaining 30% isn’t as important as we think.
An impromptu speech full of “ums” and choppy pauses can still inspire. Showing up for a friend in need, even if you’re not sure what to say, can still change their life. A slightly flawed plan can still get you where you want to go, even if it takes a little longer than you’d hoped.
The common denominator is accepting “good enough” and trying anyways.
Accepting imperfection is a courageous act, but a necessary one for our eventual success. Putting things out into the world to get shredded by reality is how we learn, iterate, and improve.
There’s no need to wait forever until the conditions are right, because they never will be.
As Burkeman puts it:
“Moving forward at 70% takes more guts, more strength of character, than holding out for 100%, because it entails moving forward amid uncertainty, anxiety, and the disagreeable feeling that comes with putting less-than-perfect work into the world.”
Imperfection is the way
Perfectionism is so vicious because it preys on our deepest fears of feeling less-than. Which is ironic — we try so desperately to be perfect, when in reality, imperfection is what the world craves the most!
Why? Because imperfection showcases our humanity. It’s vulnerable and authentic. Far from being a source of shame, it’s actually a source of strength. It shows the rest of the world that you’re just like them. Sure, there will always be judgmental trolls quick to point out our flaws, but most people will find these flaws endearing.
On the other hand, if you were perfect, you’d be much less relatable. And far less likable.
I know this may be a tough lesson to wrap your mind around. Don’t worry if it takes a while to embrace your rough edges. Even today, I struggle with this more than I’d like. But there is hope. Once I accepted that perfection wasn’t worth wrecking my peace of mind, and that no one cared about my mistakes as much as I did, I felt the stress gradually melt away. This acceptance became an act of self-kindness, one that my nervous system greatly appreciated.
And you can experience the same.
It takes courage to accept “good” instead of perfect, 70% instead of 100%, but it’s a more accurate appraisal of how life really works. And a lot more rewarding, as you move forward faster.
It’s only by accepting our limitations — and being okay with them — that we find true freedom.
So the next time you worry about making a mistake, remember this: imperfect action beats perfect inaction any day.
Or, as writer and podcaster Tim Ferriss likes to say: “Let small bad things happen.”
My piece in Hello, Mortal
Thank you to Maura McInerney-Rowley and Carolyn Gregoire at Hello, Mortal for featuring my piece on The Midnight Library last week!
Hello, Mortal is one of my favorite Substack reads. (And I’m not just saying that because I was featured.) Each week, Maura and Carolyn share reflections on how to live well in the short time we have here on Earth. By acknowledging our inevitable death, we learn to make the most of life.
If you haven’t had a chance to read Hello, Mortal, I can’t recommend it enough!
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Great post! I wouldn’t be surprised if this is one of the best performing posts for you, too! 👍
I usually relate to your posts anyway, but let me tell you, the stuff you shared about yourself here is a direct mirror to my thoughts and experience. I am a recovering perfectionist for sure. Being a proofreader/editor for a living probably doesn't help because I have to try really hard not to make a mistake and miss something. Over the years, it's also helped me not be so hard on myself too though. I think I thought I had to be perfect in order for everyone to like me because I assumed they wouldn't since I'm disabled (hello, ableism). I still get stuck in that spiral sometimes, but you put it perfectly, the imperfections are what makes us human and allow us to relate to each other. I wouldn't want to be friends with a "perfect" person, if such a thing existed. Also, I read about a book a week/every 2 weeks and almost all of them have had typos. So even if you did have one, you wouldn't be alone and you would be in some good company 😊