Complacency

I have often heard warnings in my time about the obvious dangers of the world. Don’t walk alone at night in a strange neighborhood. Don’t play with fire. Don’t give out personal information on the internet. If a stranger offers you candy, don’t get in the van. Some warnings I have ignored (the candy was worth it by the way), but there is one danger that often gets overlooked: complacency.

Too often I hear people say the words “good enough.” Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever seen made by friends, acquaintances and even myself have all started at their inception with the idea of “good enough.”

When did we stop striving for the best possible option? We have seemingly gotten into the mentality of accepting the option that takes less effort on our part. We have a tendency to become satisfied with chipped paint, with broken windows, with empty buildings, with trash on our streets, and even with a genre of music that chews up classics and vomits out remixes that sound like a buzz saw struggling to cut through an object, because, even though it’s not the best that we could have, it’s good enough. We could even say that somehow it gives things character to have these defects.

We have simply learned to be satisfied with mediocrity, because it is easier to let things slip into being mediocre than it is to cultivate them to fall in line with their true potential. We forget that things are exactly what we make them. We only get back as much effort as we’re willing to put into something.

Even when things are good, we can always make them better. We can’t reach a point of satisfaction so that things just fall by the wayside. It takes a certain level of vigilance and diligence to keep yourself out of this complacency. Things are ever changing, ever falling apart, ever needing just a little bit more effort to get closer to perfection. This effort to push things to new points must become our driving force instead of the wish to reach an end to our pursuits to produce something that is merely “good enough”. How satisfying can mediocrity really be?

I challenge you to stop and think over what you’re saying every time you say the phrase “good enough”, and what you’re really agreeing to with that sentiment. Isn’t it time we stopped saying “good enough” and started doing the extra work to make things the best they can be?

Well, I’m sure there was more that I wanted to say, and there’s more research I could probably do into the subject to get some more answers. But I guess that’s good enough for now.