Good Enough

Where, really, is “good enough”?

I recently finished a final edit of my upcoming book, then sent it off to the editor. This last edit was just one of a long series of edits, sometimes prompted by manuscript readings from friends or colleagues, sometimes prompted by, well, nothing at all… I just wasn’t happy with something, so wrote it again.

When I get the draft back from the editor, I’ll go through and evaluate her suggested changes, and edit it again.

Another iteration. I suppose everything in life is like that. Another iteration.

Wherever I am today is only the most recent iteration of me. A work in progress, I’m still editing who I am through who I want to become. Life, that ultimate editor, continues to recommend changes. The testing team continues to find defects…

I worked with a fella once who said the two most important words in life are “good enough”. Anywhere along the line, in anything you’re doing, the most important thing to define is that point when things are “good enough” for the task at hand. Without that, we waste too much time on all the wrong things.

If I’m writing software to guide a spaceship to a planet millions of miles away, good enough will require a high degree of both accuracy and precision.  But if I’m hanging a picture on the wall, doesn’t it just need to look good? Isn’t that good enough? Is there really any need for a tape measure?

When I publish my next book, I hope I’ve edited it well enough to be “good enough” for my readers. I hope the reader can feel the heat boil under a sledgehammer sun across the Sonoran Desert, baking up into the bottom of my feet as I pedal. I hope you can hear the wind rip past my ears as I scream down Wolf Creek Pass tucked tight and low. I hope you can smell the alfalfa blooming as I ride along the lee side of a field in Kansas, or feel the joy of a mighty tailwind blowing me through the profound silence of the Mojave.

I think it’s almost good enough…