The danger of “not good enough”

That’s how we choose who to work with.

We want someone who’s good at their job. And the ones we pass up are usually labeled as, “not good enough.” And we label ourselves as well. “I’d like to do that sort of work, but I’m not good enough.”

This is obviously a trap.

In almost every line of work, the truthful sentence is, “not good enough yet.”

Of course, at least once you wrote a great line of code or crafted a good headline. At least once you made a good diagnosis or calmed a patient. At least once you did something extraordinary. So it’s not that you can’t do it.

It might be that you don’t care enough to try.

“I’d like to hire that programmer, but he doesn’t care enough to get really good at his craft.” That’s certainly more true than, “He’s never going to be good at programming, because his DNA doesn’t match the DNA of a good coder.”

It’s true that you’re not good enough yet. None of us are. But if you commit to trying hard enough and long enough, you’ll get better.