Good Enough
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Wednesday @ 7:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Intelligence w/ Anita Williams Woolley. January 6th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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January 5th, 2021
The book, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus: A Roman Slave, is sitting on my night table. It is a series of maxims written before the birth of Christ, by a Syrian slave brought to Italy, who was granted manumission by impressing his master with his talents. This book got on my radar because Publius’s writings apparently influenced Seneca the Younger, who I am a fan of, and whose name is the first name you see on The Stoa website.
A lot of the maxims make me say “meh,” and others make me say “obvio,” but some really hit the thumos spot, such as …
A noble steed is not annoyed by the barking of dogs.
Powerful indeed is the empire of habit.
Be your money's master, not its slave.
A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.
Even calamity becomes virtue's opportunity.
Let your life be pleasing to the multitude, and it can not be so to yourself.
You are eloquent enough if truth speaks through you.
All of this is good stuff, and I could write journal entries about all of these, but the last one is most salient for me, especially the word “enough.” I am reminded of Donald Winnicott, the famous psychoanalyst, who came up with the concept of the “good enough parent.”
The idea here is that you do not need to be a super parent—that professional experts on parenting proselytize to us that we should be—you just need to be a good enough one, which grants a certain self-forgiveness. Good enough is always contextual, and I sense what holds a lot of people back from doing what they know they want to do, or need to do, is an undue pressure that they need to be superstars.
I probably have dyslexia, and as I wrote about before, I have a hard time getting words out of my mouth. I often mispronounce words, jumble my metaphors, and get lost in convoluted sentences. I actually feel bad for the English language when I speak it. I am not here to be an articulate superstar though, and when I anchor myself in my “only speak what I believe to be true” principle, in the spirit of truthfulness, I am not nervous, and I become eloquent enough to get my message across.
This “good enough” thing can be applied to everything of course, even all that deep stuff. You are good enough to start something. You are good enough to get the success you deserve. You are good enough to learn from your failures. You are good enough to forgive yourself. You are good enough to be here right now. You are good enough to be good enough.
You are also good enough to begin to learn something new, and we all need to learn something new now. There is lots of stuff for me to learn in 2021, some of which my late-blooming ass should have learned a long time ago, but as my homeboy Publius says: It is better to learn late than never.
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