Just Enough Is Actually Great
Do we want to achieve more of the good stuff in 2024? Yes. So, let's look at how to make resolutions manageable...and achievable!
As a society, we’ve agreed that calendar changes mean life changes.
Collectively, we’re in for the new year, new you vibes. And even if we tire of (or downright hate) that saying, let’s be honest, we also long for it, right? A new year with no mistakes in it yet.1
The fresh first page of a calendar calls to us to make changes. Enhancements. Improvements. Maybe it even inspires the desire to achieve a big, hairy, audacious goal2 in the calendar year ahead. And so we make resolutions to help us get there. I’m a fan of resolutions but I want to call out a sneaky little way the mind trips us up.
As we outline what we want in our lives for the year to come, sometimes our brain tricks us into thinking that it’s going to be really hard.
As we outline what we want in our lives for the year to come, sometimes our brain tricks us into thinking that it’s going to be really hard. I’m a person who has delighted in tacking really hard goals. All along the way, I expected it to feel hard.
And I sorta liked it.
Maybe it gave me a larger sense of accomplishment (or so I told myself…this might have also been a clue that I had an unhealthy relationship with “work,” always happy to sacrifice for the big goals and never quite satisfied with the outcome. Any other hardcore perfectionists out there feel me?).
But the benefit of being tossed around by Life in the past few years is that I finally started to see the error of my ways.
Namely, that achievement doesn’t always have to be that hard.
WAIT, WHAT?
Not to say our goals are simple or easy to achieve, but because you can achieve them “just enough,” which is actually just great.
If you are an overachiever like me, you may think that goals are meant to be exceeded; 100% is a baseline because we’re always shooting for 150% or beyond.
This used to make me feel better about myself - that I could go hard and go beyond. If you played high school or college athletics or competed academically, you probably know exactly what I’m saying and you assume the same- to accomplish a goal means to decimate it in totality. We don’t just expect to check the box, we want to “crush it.”
I’m now here to say that my thinking like this was, well, sorta stupid.
There’s a way to approach resolutions, or any goals (regardless of what we term them and when we come up with them) that requires less energy and will likely produce a higher rate of accomplishment. (All you high-performers out there, bear with me, even if this sounds like cheating.)
Instead of going hard at a goal, I call it going Just Enough. Get to that finish line just enough. Let’s say you’ve got a resolution to start meditating and you feel like that has to mean every day for 20 minutes? No, it doesn’t. That’s Totality Thinking (also a term I’ve coined just now). Just Enough thinking is *doing* it — yes, actually sitting in meditation — but not forsaking the goal just because you can’t make it a daily habit. (Yet.)
Trust yourself that that will come. But first just do it, when you can, how you can. Because—staying with this meditation example—you still receive physiological benefits from meditation, event if it’s sporadic. Same with eating more plants, if that’s on your wish list for 2024. Focus on just doing that thing that you want to implement, however you can, and cut out the chatter in your brain that tells you you’re not doing it *enough.*
The hard thing about attempting to accomplish our goals Just Enough is that we may not even understand when we’ve achieved them. Because sometimes Just Enough can be confused for Not Quite Enough. Just Enough lacks that totality that we like in our accomplishments.
But I’m here to remind you that working toward a goal (which, in our dreams, feels like running toward some imaginary finish line, breaking through the ribbon to great fanfare and flourish), can actually just be a series of moments when you choose to take actions in support of your dream. Even if that’s just every so often—and not EVERY DAY ALL DAY—you’re still being present to the process of doing, even if your brain tries to trick you into thinking that small steps are insignificant. Here are some examples:
Professionally
What this looks like professionally is the phrase: Good enough is good enough. I’m sure my beloved overachievers out there hate this phrase because in our perfectionist world we go for the the top achievement and “good enough” is like a consolation prize. Or that we’re just dialing it in. But Good Enough at work means that you’ve done exactly what was needed when it was needed. Yes, maybe you really wanted to make that presentation 10% better, but we know that last 10% is what kills progress. The last 10% sucks 90% more energy. In this case, the finish line means getting a presentation into the best version possible within reasonable time and energy. Not killing yourself with long hours and delays to rework, rework, rework.
It took me a few decades but I finally understand why this is important. Knowing what is Good Enough means that you understand the playing field. It means you know nuance and how to approach a goal with stealth, not a sledgehammer. It means you know that you have other important things to allocate your time and energy toward and that you can (checks off to-do list) achieve your goal/resolution/dream while also continuing to balance all the other things in your life that are very real-world and never stopping, not even for our hopes and dreams.
Personally
This concept of doing just enough to yield a bounty of results still trips me up because my whole life had been focused on working towards 100%-150%, at a minimum, in all areas. But as I learned the hard way, sometimes working towards Totality turns out working against achieving your dream.
Two years ago this week I was going through an IVF transfer. This was our first attempt. IVF transfers only have around a 50% success rate for women much younger than I was. But the time you get to my age, the chances of success are much lower. (Yay, reproduction doom and gloom!) With this in mind, IVF doctors often encourage a range of mind/body work to prepare and hopefully optimize chances of success. For me this looked like: cutting out alcohol and inflammatory foods; weekly acupuncture; weekly support group sessions that encouraged meditation, tapping, journaling and other ways to harmonize the mind/body connection and release stress.
I did it all.
And yet, the transfer was not successful.
Not that we know exactly why, but stress certainly lowers chance for success (in many health situations, actually). And my desire to do *everything* I could in an attempt to to create *the best* outcome possible created the exact opposite result.
It was one of those cruel life lessons, teaching the hard way that we must do just enough to relax without working too hard to actually *try* to be successful, because that will likely lead to failure.
And it did.
It was a tightrope I feel right off of.
After processing the heartbreak, we decided to try again, but this time I didn’t dive hard at the goal. I realized that I couldn’t approach this with the Straight-A-Student vibes that had served me so well in school. I had to do Just Enough… just enough meditation, journaling, tapping, or whatever to, yes, be relaxed but to also resist going into Totality because that becomes a stress zone, not a success zone. And my wish for you in the year ahead is that you can ride a wave that flows in the success zone, and away from the big stress zones. Trust me, your mind and body will thank you for it.
In Closing
Our brain (and a social environment of Go Hard thinking) has us tricked and intimidated into thinking that big gains only come from huge effort. This year, flex back hard with “Just Enough” so you can keep showing up— little by little, then more and more until you get to where you want to be. Because getting there is getting there, even if it’s just enough.
Now, let’s go make some dreams come to life!
xx M
For all the Anne of Green Gables fans out there, yes, that’s a nod to my perineal heroine, Anne Shirley.
For all the business text fans out there, yes, this is a nod to Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. A BHAG is a compelling, long-term goal that organizations set to inspire employees to take action. But I like them for personal life too. I’m such a fan of Collins’ work and always adapt it for personal development.
This one really spoke to me as a fellow perfectionist. Thank you for sharing!