Enough: The Space Between Perfect and Possible

Have you ever not done something because you were afraid you wouldn't do it well enough? Maybe you didn't start exercising because you couldn't commit to an hour at the gym. You didn't make the phone call because you weren't sure what you were going to say. You didn't pray because you didn't have 30 minutes of quiet time. Or maybe you didn't step into something God was calling you to do because you looked at the size of the task and thought: “What I have isn't enough.” There is something strangely freeing about the word enough. Because somewhere along the way, many of us have convinced ourselves that enough isn't enough. We feel the need to be better. More successful. More accomplished. More productive. More spiritual. And sometimes, in our pursuit of being extraordinary, we fail to do the ordinary things that matter most. There is another phrase made famous by Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon: “Try not to suck.” It became the rallying cry of the Chicago Cubs during their 2016 World Series Championship run, their first one in 108 years. It started the year before when Javy Baez made his debut. Manager Joe Maddon, in an effort to relax the youngster, set that as his expectation. And while that may not sound particularly inspiring, there's actually some wisdom here. Using “Try Not to Suck” with young players is a great way of taking some of the pressure off. The idea wasn't, “Don't give it your all.” It wasn't, “Mediocrity is okay.” It was essentially: Relax. Play the game. Do your job. Don't make it harder than it needs to be. And that distinction matters. Because there are times when perfection becomes the enemy of progress. We can become so concerned about doing something perfectly that we never do it at all. The first goal isn't always excellence. Sometimes the first goal is simply to begin. Start with enough. Then build from there. “Enough” isn't necessarily the destination. Sometimes “enough” is the starting line. So how do we go about this: Know what “enough” actually means. The word enough means an amount or degree that is required or needed. That's important. Because “enough” is not a synonym for lazy. It means sufficient for the purpose. A surgeon shouldn't stop halfway through an operation because the work is “good enough.” An engineer shouldn't build 80 percent of a bridge and say, “Done is better than perfect.” There are consequences to cutting corners when the stakes are high. But most of the decisions we face every day aren't life-or-death decisions. “Enough” is contextual. The appropriate minimum for a heart surgeon isn't the same as the appropriate minimum for answering an email. We all aspire to do more than the bare minimum, but we also do not want to fail to do the minimum. Sometimes we simply need to send the email or make the call. Take the walk. Clean the garage. Open the Bible or say a prayer. We don't need perfect. We need enough to move forward. Lower the barrier—but don't lower the standard. Lowering the barrier is not the same as lowering the standard. If our goal is to exercise, don't tell ourselves that we need to work out for an hour. Take a ten-minute walk. If our goal is prayer, don't convince ourselves that we need an hour of uninterrupted silence. Take seven minutes. If we want to write, don't tell ourselves we need to finish the entire article. Write the first paragraph. The ten-minute walk is better than the intense workout we never do. The text you send is better than the card not sent. One deep, mindful breath is better than the twenty-minute meditation we never begin. Make the first move small enough that we actually make it. Stop letting “perfect” become an excuse. I've spent time working with a technology startup, and one concept I learned there was the Minimum Viable Product—or MVP. An MVP is essentially the smallest version of a product that provides value to the user. Why? Because if we wait until everything is perfect, we may spend enormous amounts of time and money building something nobody wants. Instead, we put something useful into the world. We get feedback. We learn. We improve. And we keep going. There's a lesson there for us. Maybe our first version isn't supposed to be perfect. Maybe our first attempt is supposed to teach us what the second attempt needs to be. Give ourselves permission to be beginners, be novices. This is where “Try Not to Suck” becomes useful. When we're doing something new, we're probably going to be bad at it. That's not failure. That's being new. G.K. Chesterton said: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” That doesn't mean we should take pride in doing poor work. It means doing something imperfectly can be better than refusing to do it because we're afraid of being imperfect. We misfire. We make mistakes. We learn. We adjust and go again. Stop measuring our enough against someone else's “er.” I once did an FCA Huddle lesson with high school students about what I called the “er” complex. And it really hit home with teenagers. Who is prettier? Who is stronger? Who is wealthier? Who is funnier? Who is smarter? Who is more popular? Teenagers are at an age when peer pressure is significant, and benchmarking themselves against everybody around them can become an everyday experience. But the truth is, we don't necessarily grow out of that. We just get better at hiding it. Adults may not be comparing who has the coolest sneakers but we can be comparing careers, houses, bank accounts, vacations, how successful our kids are, and in my case how many people read my blog posts or download my podcasts. And somewhere along the way, we start asking: “Am I enough?” But here's what I told those high school students: God didn't create us, love us, and die for us so that we could spend our precious time looking around man's world to determine whether we're good enough. We are enough because of Him. That's a very different definition of enough. It doesn't mean we're complete nor that we shouldn't grow or continue striving for excellence. It means our worth isn't determined by the person standing next to us. This brings us to the story regarding the loaves and the fish in The Feeding of the Thousands, the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels. The disciples looked at what they had and compared it to what was needed. And by their calculation, what they have seems woefully inadequate. But Jesus didn't ask them if they had enough. He asked: “What do you have?” Five loaves. Two fish. It wasn't enough by the world's measurement. But it was enough for Jesus to work with. God doesn’t ask for abundance. God creates abundance out of what we have to offer even if what we have doesn’t seem enough. Remember that we are enough before we ever accomplish enough. This may be the most important point. We can confuse what we do with who we are. We can believe that if we accomplish enough, make enough money, help enough people, or become successful enough, then we'll finally be enough. But that's backwards. Our worth isn't a performance review. God doesn't love us because we performed well this quarter. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:10: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Notice the order - We are God's handiwork. Then comes the work. Our work doesn't create our worth. Our worth gives meaning to our work. It frees us to fail. It frees us to learn. It frees us to say: “I'm not perfect. But I'm willing.” So here's the challenge. Think of one thing you've been putting off because you don't think you can do it well enough. Something you've been waiting to get perfect. Something that seems too big. Ask yourself: “What is the smallest thing I can do to start?” Take the ten-minute walk. Write the first paragraph. Make the phone call. Open the book. Have the conversation. Apologize. Forgive. Volunteer. Spend seven minutes in prayer. Jesus isn't asking how much time we wish we had. He's asking how much time we actually have. And here's another question worth asking. Where in my life am I demanding perfection when “enough” would actually accomplish the purpose? Because there are times when excellence matters. There are times when the standard needs to be high. But there are also times when our pursuit of perfection isn't producing excellence. It's producing paralysis. And that's different. Maybe today we don't need to be extraordinary. Maybe we just need to be willing. Maybe we don't need more. Maybe we need to recognize what we already have.  And maybe that's what “enough” really means. Not that we stop striving. Not that we settle. Not that we abandon excellence. But that we recognize the difference between doing our best and demanding that our best always be perfect. So maybe the goal isn't to be perfect. Maybe the goal isn't even to be great. Maybe today the goal is simply: Don't suck. God doesn't need us to bring him everything. He asks us to bring what we have. And when we do, He can do something with it. “We are enough because of Him.”