There’s research on the difference between people who always need the best and people who always need to meet their own criteria. The first group are called maximizers: they are often exhausted by the need to explore all possibilities before making a choice. The others are called satisficers: on the whole, they make choices with less effort. As long as a choice is good enough, it’s good enough.
If you’re fine the way you are, do that. Your brain/body system likes homeostatis. It likes to use automatic processes to keeps things as they are. You’re alive now and homeostasis means you get to stay alive.
But maybe homeostasis isn’t enough for you. Maybe you are not fine with where you’re at. This doesn’t mean you have to give up on happiness: it means you need a skill set that allows you to make change happen. Sometimes, we need to move from good enough to better.
You need to know what would be satisfying, and then you need to do the work and accept the price of getting there. This doesn’t take magic, but it does take practice. Betting on yourself means more than hoping you’ll get better. It means developing the resilience and direction to keep moving through difficulty.
You can practice without a community to support you, but a community will definitely make you more efficient and happier while you work. We gather often so that we can practice the self-awareness and self-management it takes to keep moving when fine isn’t good enough.
