Simone Stolzoff

It was called The Good Enough Mother or The Good Enough Parent.

And Winnicott was observing how, he's a doctor in England in the mid-20th century, how these parents were trying to be the perfect parent.

They were trying to shield their kid from experiencing any sort of negative emotion or harm.

And then when the kid inevitably felt frustrated or sad or angry...

The parent would take it extremely personally.

And so Winnicott proposed an alternative.

He called it the good enough parent.

And he said, rather than striving for perfection, if you strive for sufficiency, it benefits both the child and the parent.

The kid can learn how to self-soothe and take care of some of their own issues.

And the parent won't lose themselves in their children's emotions.

So in the book, I make the direct allusion to the working world, where so often we talk about the dream job and perfection and create so much room for disappointment underneath that sky-high ideal.

So I define a good enough job as a job that allows you to be the type of person that you want to be.

It's sufficiently vague, but I like that everyone can define what a good enough job means for themselves.

Maybe for one person, it's a job that allows them to pick up their kid from elementary school.

Or another person, it's a job that allows them to go on that afternoon bike ride that really makes their life meaningful.

And maybe for someone else, it's a job that pays a certain amount of money or a job that has a certain job title.

But the truth is we get to define what good enough means to us.

And once you have your own definition of good enough, you can divert some of that attention and energy that you might be giving to questioning whether you found your perfect calling towards other aspects of your life that might make your life meaningful.

Great.

I couldn't say it better myself.