One Good Word
(Why you need more spectrums and fewer thresholds)
Recently, I’ve been dogged by a strange feeling that I’m not good enough.
Not in a low self-esteem kind of way. It’s more of a “skill issue” feeling. I feel like I’m not good enough at the things I try to do.
No matter how much I accomplish, a part of my mind stays fixated on the mistakes I made along the way, or the tasks I haven’t been able to get to yet.
To be clear, this feeling is objectively bonkers.
I know that, because I still feel “not good enough” even when every possible piece of evidence contradicts that feeling.
Last week, I gave a bow to thundering applause.
My best friend1 and I had just delivered a stellar keynote. The audience leaned in, took notes - even put their phones away. During the grand finale when our wives rushed the stage to shower us in bubbles2, the room erupted in the biggest laughter I’ve ever heard from an audience.
I’ve been speaking professionally for more than a decade. I know a great talk when I see one, and we had just delivered a PHENOMENAL talk.
And yet!
Before the applause had even faded, I felt a surge of sadness and regret.
Your talk wasn’t good enough.
You didn’t have enough good ideas.
You let everyone down.
I know these feelings are not an accurate reflection of the world. I know that even if they were, my value as a person isn’t determined by how much I accomplish.
But knowing the truth doesn’t stop you from feeling the lie. And for whatever reason, I've been feeling the lie a lot recently.
That’s a big part of why it’s been a few months since I’ve last written. I’ve started writing a few different times, and each time I stop.
It’s not going to be good enough.
Not enough people will read it.
You’re going to disappoint your readers.
Nothing that I try to write feels good enough. This post certainly doesn’t.
But, I’m still choosing to write it. And I’m choosing to hit publish.
Here’s why.
A goal can be a threshold or a spectrum.
A threshold either happens or it doesn’t. Nothing else matters.
If a sports team loses, it doesn’t matter if they lost by 1 point or 100.
If you’re late for a flight, it doesn’t matter if you miss it by 5 minutes or 5 hours.
And, if that plane crashes, it doesn’t matter if it crashed on takeoff or flew 1000 miles before going splat.
A spectrum, conversely, is an infinite line. You can move up and down the line, but you never reach the end.
If I go on a walk for 10 minutes, I become a little healthier.
If I spend 10 dollars at Taco Bell, I become a little less healthy3
The deepest lie of “not good enough” is that it trains us to view spectrums as thresholds.
Your 10 minute walk wasn’t good enough, because it wasn’t a 10 mile run.
Your talk wasn’t good enough, because it didn’t get a standing ovation.
Your writing wasn’t good enough, because it didn’t turn out exactly the way you wanted.
This is a trap.
A spectrum stretches on forever, so there will always be more that you could do. When you compare what you could have accomplished with what you actually accomplished, you’ll never feel like you did “good enough.”
But what matters is not what you could have done. What matters is what you actually did.
You created a good thing where nothing existed before. You moved the spectrum of the world closer to goodness.
Maybe you could have created a better thing. So what? The thing you made is still good, and imagining a hypothetical better thing doesn’t change that.
Maybe the thing you created is small and imperfect. So what? Kittens are small and imperfect, and the world is much better because they’re here4.
And, no great thing ever starts as a great thing anyway. We build mountains by stacking a lifetime of imperfect pebbles. The internal critic only judges your pebble because it doesn’t recognize the seed of a mountain5.
My writing feels like a threshold, like something I’ll never be good enough at.
But I believe it’s a spectrum. I believe I have infinite ways to make a good thing, and that I can add to the goodness in the world even if I never make a perfect thing.
I don’t feel that way. But I don’t need to.
I get to choose whether I follow my feelings or my beliefs.
And so, I choose to write.
Because I believe that if I can write one good word - if I can bring just one true thing into the world - it’ll be worth it.
Maybe this post sucks.
Maybe you’re the only person that will ever read it.
But maybe… that’s okay.
Perhaps there’s one good word, one tiny truth, that you can take from this and carry with you6. Maybe you’ll find something in my struggle that gives you courage or comfort in yours.
And who knows? Maybe you’ll share one good word with someone else, and we’ll build our mountain together, pebble by pebble.
There are eight billion people on earth that I could reach with my writing.
But if I can touch one, just one
that’s good enough.
https://kylershumway.com/
Public speaking is fun!
But a little happier
The world is better because you’re here, too.
I was very proud of myself for finding a cover photo that had a pebble in the foreground and a mountain in the distance
You might not realize it yet, but you’ll have it when you need it. http://web.archive.org/web/20180206023542/http://toogoodtofail.com/saying-the-magic-words/