Why You Should Love Doing Something ‘Good Enough’ . . . And The Trap It Creates

I am writing this article with my ego being just a little bruised. Here is the story . . .

By Steve Moran

I am writing this article with my ego being just a little bruised. Here is the story . . .

Senior Housing Forum has a fairly new partner called OneDay. They have created this really cool app to capture resident stories in little easy-to-produce segments. The first article we published for them resulted in an almost overwhelming response.

The second article I wrote was about how to also use it as a marketing tool to create quick little “thanks for visiting” videos after a tour. To make the article more dynamic I created my very own example “Thanks for visiting” video and embedded in the article.  

It turned out that video, in fact, wasn’t “good enough”, so I recorded a second one that still was not as good as I had hoped, but at least a little better than the first video.

Good Enough

Whether writing articles or making videos or running a senior living community, “Good Enough” is an on-going conundrum.  

As we publish Senior Housing Forum, we know that we sometimes miss. In some cases there is a typo that we should have caught. Sometimes we publish an article that hardly anyone is interested in. I have published articles where I thought something, then re-evaluated the same subject in a very different way. Yet, at the end of the day, we have come to realize that we need to publish every day and — while it would be possible to make an article even better — at some point it is good enough and simply needs to be published. This works particularly well with a blog due to the fact that tomorrow we will publish something new, and the day after that something else new.

Not Good Enough

The trap is — and the one I fell into with the first video in that article — was that what I accepted as good enough, was not really good enough at all . . . and that was bad. And because it was not good enough, I replaced it.

Resolving the Conundrum

Senior Living is an on-going, never-ending process of serving residents, family members, team members and the broader marketplace community. Each day there are hundreds — more likely thousands — of interactions that are great, terrible or good enough. Making it all work needs to perhaps look like this:

1. There are times when “good enough” needs to be fine. Going back to my video, would either the first or the second video have impressed the prospect? Likely yes, because — at present — they would have never seen anything like that.   
   
   The danger is that with something like that video . . . you record, re-record and re-record again. You watch them over and over, yet each time they will seem worse and worse and you can get really discouraged. This turns to paralysis, which is way worse than “Good Enough”.

2. Because “Good Enough” is less than perfect, there has to be an openness to taking in feedback that says, “You know, that really wasn’t good enough.” Then take that and learn from it. You can choose to either redo it or simply do better next time.

3. Every interaction, every thing you do, needs to be looked at under the lens of ‘How can we do this better?’  Think in terms of: ‘This was a great start, but let’s get even better.’

That’s all I have for this article . . . I just hope it is good enough for you.