Serenity of Good Enough

Lately, I have been trying to guess how much effort I have put into the things that I’m interested in up to now and the general outcomes from them. Not like guessing a quantitative sum of it, but more like a general feeling to assess. This led me to think about the concept of this month’s IndieWeb topic:

Good Enough.

Two very powerful words. Good; not perfect, and enough; not complete.

Not always, but from time to time, I’m struggling to escape the dungeon of perfectionism. It’s not that much of a big deal, but at some point, the itch keeps staying in the back of my head for an annoyingly long time, if I feel the thing I’m currently working on is not “perfect”. I keep coming back to it and stuck on some tiny details that don’t obstruct the main function by any means. This, many times, had given me a huge mental load to resolve. I get ideas about it which half of the time lead to nothing and everything starts buzzing in my head. Eventually, either I keep being stuck there with the bee nest or lose interest in it and quit.

Fortunately, this does not happen all the time. I got better over the years and after gathering some experience in my personal and professional life. My savior was learning to say “Okay, that’s good enough” to myself.

This blog was a big example of it. I have designed it, even before going online, at least 4 times from scratch. Using many different tools and many different ideas. The funny thing is I just blocked myself from writing and publishing no matter how it looks. It had to be perfect. It had to be excellent, it had to have all the functions I had imagined from day one… I remember I had spent at least one week every day after my daily job to find the perfect typeface combination and afterwards I just deleted the entire CSS file out of frustration and started over.

This just kept me away from the actual thing: blogging. Just writing and leaving the other parts as good enough. Because how it looks right now will probably change over time. Instead of spending an enormous effort perfecting it, I chose to get rid of the bee nest in my head and feel the serenity of good enough.

This was written for the April 2024 IndieWeb Carnival hosted by Aaron “RisingThumb” Leonard.

This month’s theme is: “Good Enough” – the Drop in Quality’s Siren Call

If you want to see the posts written until now, check this here. Looking forward to reading your contribution!

April 2024 IndieWeb Carnival is finished now. Check out the final roundup from Aaron here.