Issue #25: Good Enough Is Good Enough
There was a song our teachers taught us how to sing when I was in primary school. It goes thus:
There was a song our teachers taught us how to sing when I was in primary school. It goes thus:
Good, better, best Never let it rest Until your good is better And your better is best
We’d sing the song every day after assembly as we marched into our classes, our tiny legs stomping the grass underneath. We sang the words with gusto, ready to start the day of learning. A somewhat healthy way to interpret the song is to see it as a call to keep trying to get better, never resting on one’s laurel, and focusing on one’s growth, shunning peer comparison. But we didn’t interpret it that way. Well, I didn’t, and I know many people I grew up with didn’t either. We were educated in a school system where we were constantly compared with our peers. The assignments, tests, and exams all conspired towards one goal - to rank us at the end of the school year. Your report card disclosed your ranking. Someone had to be first and someone last. In an environment like that, your better isn’t really good enough until you are better than everyone else. The goal was to be the best. Many of us internalised that message.
Being raised so early in an environment where peer comparison is the norm is the root of many people’s problems. I’ve had conversations with brilliant people who aren’t doing badly in life but are perpetually sad because they are constantly comparing themselves with others and think they should be doing better than those people. Their reasoning? They used to be “gifted kids” in primary and secondary schools, always top-of-class, so they expect that dominance to persist throughout their life. Search Twitter for “gifted kid”, and you will see countless tweets of people who thought of themselves as precocious kids but now express sadness at being mediocre adults. Many of these people you will find have good jobs and are doing well in life by many people’s standards. But it is not enough because they aren’t the best. That thought was what led me to tweet this about two weeks ago:
A few people asked me if the tweet was a sub to someone, but it wasn’t at all. It is the truth about a lot of us. We achieved so much academic success as kids, and everyone told us we were brainiacs. Sadly, some parents even physically abused their kids when they didn’t meet some ridiculously high standards. The result is that many people don’t know how to deal with failure and defeat. They don’t know how to deal with not always being the best at things. Good isn’t good enough for them. But the truth is that life will inevitably land everyone with crushing defeats and failure. There is no escaping it. It is also impractical to always expect to be the best at things. The best thing I have found is to learn how to shed that weight of expectation to always be excellent and be happy with being good enough. That is what I have found to be one of the keys to being less sad in life. (I say less sad because I think it is impossible to be free of sadness. Sadness and pain, unfortunately, are fundamental parts of the human experience. The goal is to reduce them to the barest minimum.)
It is best to learn how to handle failure and how to accept not always being the best when one is young, and I was lucky I did. I was one of those top-of-the-class students throughout primary and secondary schools. I breezed through. Everyone told me I was brilliant, and I saw myself the same way. I always expected to be one of the best at everything I did. I did that without hassle until I tried to get university admission. As the first child of my parents, I was the family’s guinea pig. I was experimented upon. My parents, bless their hearts, didn’t always have a clue, so when my Uncle Soji, my London uncle, came home one December and told me he would build me a hospital if I decided to study medicine, my parents nudged me in that direction. They got me a JAMB form, and I chose the university where I wanted to study. I spent months preparing for the exam and passed with quite a high score.
There was only one hurdle left: post-JAMB, the university-administered exam I had to write to get into the medical programme. I thought it was going to be a cinch. I was wrong. I failed it. I remember that day vividly. My dad drove me to the university to check my score. We saw that I didn’t make it. It was a few hours drive back to our house. I cried all the way home. How did I fail? I had never failed until then. I couldn’t believe it. It was crushing. My teenage ego was bruised, but my dad was gracious. He let me cry, and then he spent hours telling me how it is okay to fail and that one failure doesn’t change who I am.
That experience changed my life. Firstly, I would have been a miserable doctor. I shudder at the thought of dissecting cadavers. I doubt I would have enjoyed a career in medicine. Secondly, it changed my outlook on life. I started learning how to accept that I won’t always be excellent in everything and that sometimes I will only be good enough and that that is good enough. It led me, as I matured into adulthood, to temper my lofty ambitions with reasonable expectations. I don’t blindly chase after excellence. I give my all whenever I do anything, and if that ends up falling short of what society deems as excellent, I will still be happy. I also try not to look at what other are doing and them start comparing myself against them. I say I try because that isn’t always easy. What I have done is to define what is a good enough life for me. What matters to me? What brings me joy? How much stuff do I need? Those and many other questions are what I answered when I was defining what good enough means for me. It’s a way of adjusting my expectations. The psychologist and philosopher, William James, postulated that happiness/self-esteem is a ratio of one’s success and one’s expectations. According to him, one will be happier if one tempers one’s expectations. It’s what I have done. I won’t let society’s constant demand and push for excellence and success rob me of my joy.
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