Good Enough is Good Enough

When I was a kid I had a friend, who for purposes that she remain my friend now, I will call Q, who was an absolute perfectionist. When I would go over to her house to play after school we never actually got to play because we had to do our homework first. I had plenty of time to play because I would whip through my homework as fast as I could. But not Q. She agonized over every assignment. She used multiple colored pencils to do her math. Just the picking up and putting down of the color she was looking for made ten fifth grade math assignments take four times as long as it should have. I was never really sure what the different colors meant, but it was something very important to her.
Now Q grew up to be an accountant and I have to say I wish our accountant was as persnickety as she is. The other thing about Q was her bedroom was always immaculate and her clothes never stained or wrinkled and her hair the perfect Farrah Fawcet flip, even though it was naturally straight. I was amazed that she would even be friends with me, with my clothes piled up on my closet floor as I would search my room for my hair brush and eventually give up and go out with my rats nest hairdo.
Since today is cyber Monday and apparently I am the only person not shopping online for my Christmas gifts, I saw an article espousing the old adage, “Perfect is the enemy of good enough.” Apparently the perfectionism trait is making shopping a terrible chore for those who are afflicted with it. There are people who spend hours upon hours reading reviews and comparing prices, which is bad enough, but then they compare shipping rates and how far items will come from and before you know it they have wasted five hours to save three dollars and only bought one thing.
The same article that talked about the “perfectionism problem” went on to say that people who are happy with good enough are actually happier with everything. Finally, my lifetime of feeling inferior to Q because my book covers did not look brand new come June, or that my white converse sneakers were grey one week after purchase means I might actually have been OK because I was just fine with good enough.
I may never had been a perfectionist at anything, but I have the opposite issue in that I figured I could do almost anything even without instruction. This was much harder back in the pre-Internet/YouTube days. Of course that was also before anyone could really check up on my claims. This is how I got to be a caterer. One day I cooked food for a party and the next day I called myself a caterer. Of course once I got business cards it was really official. Now I have never gone so far as to try and conduct surgery on anyone, but then again if I was in a jungle with no other medical help I might try.
For today I am celebrating my “good enough” personality and no longer worrying about not being close to perfect. It has gotten me this far and I am very happy.