How To Be Good Enough: A 5-Step Guide

On a wall in my parents’ study hangs a painting of some yellow tulips in a vase. Unassuming as it may seem, it holds one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about creativity, work, and life.

Obsession with Perfection

No matter who you are or what you do, you’ll recognize this situation: You’ve worked on a project for a long time, you’ve poured your heart and soul into it, and now you’re nagged by a voice in the back of your head saying “Sure, it’s good, but is it good enough?” This voice, judgemental and critical of everything we do, is probably one of the biggest reasons why so many projects are left unfinished and why so many of our aspirations remain just that.

This is me. Every. Single. Day. Some might call it Impostor Syndrome, but that doesn’t quite fit here: There’s a difference between feeling you are not good enough and knowing you can always do better. What I’m talking about falls squarely in the second category.

When I work on something, I can feel a battle being waged in my head between a wildly creative squirrell constantly jumping around and wanting to paint everything red, no orange! no PURPLE! and a serious academic with no time for play and a grave concern for punctuality and exceptionalism.

I explained all this to my wife, and she asked the obvious question: “How do you get things done if you constantly question whether it’s good enough?”

“I think it’s because of the yellow tulips,” I answered, and immediately realized that I needed to provide a bit more context.

Many years ago, my mother took an oil painting course. After several weeks, she came home in a bit of a huff, beautiful painting in hand, and explained that the teacher had made her stop. Even though my mom felt the painting was not finished, the teacher had made her put the brushes down and let it set. “Oil paint” she explained, “takes a long time to dry, so you can keep working at it endlessly, painting over what you’ve done and reworking it until the end of time. At some point you just have to decide it’s done. Finished. Good enough.”

Little did my mom know this would become one of the key formative events to my life, both professionally and personally.

Your Path To Success

Over the years, what started out as “you have to decide when something is done” has evolved to a simple five-step process:

Step 1: Define the Audience

The question “is this good enough” is meaningless unless you define your target audience. On its own, the question stands up to your own impossible standards. With an audience defined, it becomes much easier to answer. “Is this good enough to the people it was created for?” By offloading the job of being final judge to others, you can make more objective decisions.

Step 2: Define Scope, Goals, and Measures of Success

Defining the scope of work will provide a clear framework to work within. A clear set of goals and measurements on whether those goals are achieved rounds up this step. Once it’s live, nobody will care if the website you’ve built is pixel-perfect to the original Photoshop drafts. All visitors care about is getting the info they need in the quickest and easiest way possible.

Step 3: Set Limits

Before getting started, set absolute limits on the time (and materials) you’ll spend on the project. Given endless time and money, anything can be perfected, but that’s not the reality we live in. When and if you need to go beyond those limits, ask yourself “will spending 2 extra hours on this make enough of a difference to the audience that it is worth it?”

Step 4: Get A Second Opinion

You know what you’re capable of, but you are also your own worst critic. How often have you written something off as “not good enough,” only to discover years later that it had potential? To avoid trapping yourself in a cycle of self-critique, get a second opinion from someone you trust. When doing so, make sure to not prime them by asking questions like “I don’t like the way this blue looks on the sky. What do you think?” Instead, ask them for their honest overall opinion and take it at face value. If they don’t bring up the blue in the sky, it probably never warranted that much attention.

Step 5: Check Your Privilege and Your Bias

This last one is often the hardest because it requires serious introspection. No matter who you are, you are privileged and biased. You know things nobody else does, and you have your own way of seeing the world. This is what makes you unique and what allows you to be creative, but it is also what makes you question yourself. You know what you are capable of, and you know that given endless time and money, you can always make something better. And because you’ve been working on something for a long time, you’ve spent far more time thinking about it than anyone else. As a result, you come at your project with a critical eye that is far more intense than anyone else’s. So, check  your privilege and bias at the door and approach what you’ve created with as objective a mind as you can. It’ll help you see what you’ve achieved rather than the flaws you’ve been obsessing over.

Be Better by Appreciating Your Own Work

If you’re thinking “This looks an awful lot like a method for half-assing things,” you are precisely the person who needs these steps in your life. In my interactions with people, I’ve noticed we can roughly be divided into 2 groups: The people who create things and are happy with them, and the people who create things and are unhappy with them. Both these groups create great things and both these groups create not-so-great things. The difference is how much of an internal struggle they had to go through to get the final thing out into the world. If you find yourself in the latter group, these 5 steps will help you learn to appreciate your own work and realize that good really is good enough.

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Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a Front End Web Development Teacher, Speaker, Workshop Trainer and Author specializing in web standards and WordPress. He's a full time Senior Staff Author at Lynda.com with more than 60 courses in the library. You can watch all his courses at Lynda.com/mor10, find him on just about any social media network @mor10, and read his personal musings on his blog at mor10.com.