Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “enough.” This is really an important word to have in our vocabulary and to understand. It’s a word for the concept of acceptance, and acceptance is itself a powerful tool. One if the major mantras of my life has been the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
The Serenity Prayer conveys that there is such a thing as healthy acceptance, and that there is also unhealthy acceptance, and that we should seek to discern the difference between the two.
Originally, “enough” has its roots in a Hebrew word meaning “to rest, to be quiet or satisfied.” Webster’s 1828 Dictionary describes “enough” as: “A sufficiency; a quantity of a thing which satisfies desire, or is adequate to the wants.” Though Webster also notes, “Sometimes it denotes diminution, delicately expressing rather less than is desired; such a quantity or degree as commands acquiescence, rather than full satisfaction.” When does “enough” feel truly adequate? When does “enough” feel insufficient?
Exploring Enough
Yes, there are many different connotations to the word “enough”! I understand if you might be feeling a little confused right now. Let’s spend a moment exploring “enough” in the context of everyday life. …Say you’re parking your car next to the street curb, and you ask, “Am I close enough?” In that context “enough” is a pretty harmless word.
Then imagine you’re having surgery, on your eyeball, or a cancerous tumor, or pretty much any part of your body. I’m guessing you won’t want the surgeon to be asking “Am I close enough?” What an unpleasant conversation that would be: “Well, Wendy, we operated on your gall bladder instead of your appendix, but we thought it was close enough!”
In some situations “close enough” is just not adequate, and it’s important to recognize those situations. But, what I really want to get at today is that for a lot of life, “close enough” is actually sufficient, and healthy.
My mom and I were doing physical therapy together a while back, me for my knee and her to recover from her recent surgeries. The other day we were at the pool together doing our physical therapy exercises, and she asked me “Am I doing the exercise right?” to which I responded “It’s close enough!” The way she was moving was close to the ideal, and at this point while she’s just starting out, the most important thing is for her to just engage in movement.
There are seasons in time where whatever you’re doing has to be absolutely accurate, but oftentimes when you’re just starting something, you can celebrate even if the first pass isn’t perfect.
When my son, Viktor, started crawling, instead of moving forwards, he started off by crawling backwards! Am I condemning Viktor for crawling backwards? Of course not! He’s taking those first steps, and that is absolutely good enough.
Form is everything when you’re an Olympic athlete, but the truth is that the rest of us need to start giving ourselves permission to get “enough” done, without being absolute about it. My marketing guru, Roy H. Williams, likes to quote G.K. Chesterton on the subject: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
What nagging tasks do you have on your mind, either in your life or in your business? Would doing these “well enough” take a load off of your shoulders?
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