Until You’ve Arrived, Just Enough is Never Enough

One of my nieces recently approached me to talk through her job search. We spoke of her objectives, the types of jobs that interested her, and her approach to launching her professional career in her first post-college job search. I encouraged her to take a networking approach and pointed her in a few directions. As she progressed, she shared a few updates. Over time, I noticed that she would go in spurts. A contact would give her an idea or another connection and she would back-off going to events. A name I gave, responded, and she would stop reaching out to others on the list to see how the first contact played out.

As I watched, I realized that there was always something else she could be doing. Another phone call. Another email. Another event. Another contact. Until she had arrived at the conclusion of her search, there was never too much activity. Yet, like most of us, she would invest just enough to get to the next step of her journey. I often see this in sales-related roles. Faced with an endless horizon of opportunities that require lots and lots of activity to uncover, most development people get a few things in their hopper, and cycle on them to some form of closure before adding more.

This strategy is great if the opportunities you find first, happen to work out. It breaks down quickly if things don’t happen as desired…which is normally the case. When it comes to generating opportunities, we cannot do “too much” to increase our chances of success. However, our normal mindset is to do just enough to give us the feeling that we’re on our way. Growing up, this happens in our schoolwork, our chores, and even our friendships. We study enough to get passable grades, clean up enough to keep mom off our back, and flex enough to remain likable to our friends.

Of course there are exceptions, we also have a wonderful capacity to over-achieve. When we really want something, we’ll do almost anything to get it. Particularly when we’re young, we have amazing energy and an incredible capacity to work really hard. However, our tendency is to pull up short. We have the endurance but it costs a lot to engage it. Sports are a great example. Even when we want to achieve something, we still need coaches to push us beyond “just enough.”

As we get older, we try to live on being “smarter.” We conserve our energy and use leverage to get things done. Over time, we tend to invest less energy and expect greater returns. Here, we begin to succumb to sloth – a malaise brought-on by our resistance to give it all. It’s painful to give it all – we come to a point where we don’t want to press to that edge, let alone beyond it. We calculate and do just enough to get by. But just enough is never enough – at least to flourish. When we aim for just enough, we always come up short of all that might be. It is a failure to steward our gifts and our energy; it is a failure to show up with our best effort.

Ancient monks called sloth the “noon day devil.” That part of the day when the going gets tough – I’m tired, I’m bored, I don’t feel like it. Perhaps I don’t have to put in the work. But it catches up with us. Yes, it shows in our performance and results. However, the worst effects go unseen. It degrades confidence. It lessens joy. It removes the color from our days and prevents satisfaction. It makes our time tasteless, bereft of the flavors that make the feast of life enjoyable. It weakens us and makes us susceptible to disease of heart and mind and soul. And when the inevitable lows come, it leaves us unprepared and vulnerable to the dangers of loss.

Sloth weakens our will and erodes our strength. It causes us to forget our true capacities to create, to build, to push, and to endure. It breaks down fortitude and leaves us gasping when the hits come. It lessens us and makes flourishing impossible. Sloth convinces us that even the things we like to do aren’t worth doing. It makes life uninteresting. It makes things seem pointless. It makes goals feel impossible and people appear as barriers and vampires. The noon day devil is incredibly difficult to escape. It hides behind rationalizations and blame. It whispers and shifts and shimmies. It is a low feeling, a brain cloud, a heavy heart.

The cure is wholeheartedness, an all-in embrace of the life that is ours. To break the feeling requires us to start small and often begins on physical activity. Do something. Get moving. Get active. Volume of activity breaks sloth’s grip. The initial step demands a massive dose of will – the wheels will grind and resist but the rust shakes quickly. Walk toward the thing you don’t want to do. How much do I have to do? Do 2, 3, 4 times what you think you need to do. Push. The more you roll, the more you’ll want to roll.

What is Arrival?

Many years ago, I read an interview with a beer entrepreneur – it might have been Jim Koch, the founder of Samuel Adams. In it, he described his moment of arrival: “I was standing on a cliff edge in a national park. Looking down, I noticed one of our bottle caps tossed on the ground. In that moment I knew we had arrived.” The story stayed with me as a very curious way to measure success but it also resonated: we’re so big that one might find remnants of our products as trash in an isolated spot in a national park.

Growing up, I loved to watch the Little Rascals. Sally and I still occasionally talk about an episode in which one of the Little Rascals is frustrated with having to eat mush for his meal. “Someday, when my ship comes in, I’ll never eat mush again,” he proclaims. Later in the episode, we see him sitting in a large, elegant, dining room with all of his friends. The table is set with all the fineries, and attendants bring out large serving platters with silver covers on them. We watch as the Rascals wait with hungry anticipation, while the covers are lifted to reveal fancy bowls filled with mush. Arrival indeed.

What is arrival? Is it a place? A state of mind? A number in a bank account? A bottle cap tossed on the ground in a public park? Is it that perfect job, or just our first “real” job? Maybe it’s knowing you can order any meal you want. Of course, it’s a misnomer, our lives are built on many arrivals…and many departures. For that beer baron, the affirmation of that trashed bottle cap was just a moment. Many arrivals, as well as the desire for more, surely followed his experience in the park.

As time goes on, I’m more inclined to see “arrival” as the point in time when we stop grasping. For what we don’t have. For what we should have or what we see others having. For survival, fulfillment, meaning, the passions that drive us crazy, the limelight or “Like” or positive review. Maybe arrival is when we stop saying “someday” or “when my ship comes in.”

Arrival is some form of enough. A place where we can experience contentment with our condition, place, status, address in the world. Where we surrender how we think it should be and embrace what it is. Not in a white flag, “I give up” kind of way, but in an assent to seeing what is good and true and beautiful in this place, this moment, this reality.

Can we be comfortable in our own skins? Can we trust that we’re not being short-changed, cheated, or duped in our particular reality? Not grasping does not mean sitting back, doing nothing, or giving-in to the “I don’t wanna” of sloth. It’s recognizing that the gift of this moment is enough and the next is just a bonus. It is a perpetual prayer of gratitude, even as we go about climbing the next mountain or charting a course across the open sea. It is recognizing that our grasping is what gives us anxiety, fosters fear, and creates rifts in our relationships.

We think we want arrival. We think we want to solve the puzzle and put the trophy on the shelf. But it is the working at it that makes it meaningful and brings us fully alive. In that sense, there is not, and never should be, enough, AND, we should wake each day seeing that yesterday was, in fact, enough, and that today is just one more gift.

Youth Isn’t Wasted

One of the gifts of time and self-reflection is seeing the many opportunities we had to do things differently. One potential burden of such a gift is regret. Another potential burden is feeling like we’re obliged to share our expertise in life’s realities with those following behind. The glorious thing about arriving at this place in our life is that it is ours. All of it. The mistakes, the gifts, the successes, the failures, and everything in between. They are all part of our arriving. And our departing.

There is always more to be done. There is always more to be had. There is always a better way, a woulda, shoulda, or coulda. Yes, there are truly hard realities of life. We have to find our way to putting a roof over our head, feeding our family, and supporting our daily iced carmel macchiato habit. These are the necessities. Beyond such necessities, the world’s an open field of possibilities with extremes in all directions.

A great beauty of life is watching as the things one once thought were important, disappear into the background behind the things one discovers are truly important. The “enough” of yesterday is no longer near the list of priorities, and the “arrival” of today can bring about as much wonder and delight as we ever imagined possible in the things we’ve left behind. What remains are the necessities of our own experience. The way we had to get there, it’s mistakes, and the glory of its discoveries. Each shaping a piece of that blog post we’ll one day write explaining the secret of it all.

A secret we discover that was only meant for us.