Maybe You’re Not Good Enough
On the power and influence of choice
Having goals and desires bring meaning to our existence. They help propel us throughout the day toward a destination, they shape the way we interact with the world, and they provide a guide for the actions we take.
But sometimes, even with the best of intentions, even with the greatest of efforts, we come up short of achieving our goals. And maybe it is because we’re just not good enough to achieve them.
When most of us hear this, we get angry and frustrated, we get down on ourselves, potentially even beat ourselves up.
But this is actually an extremely powerful understanding. When going after a goal, especially a stretch goal or goals that are so outside the realm of imagination, we need to understand the odds and where we stack up against them.
Maybe “you’re not good enough” is, if we listen, the perfect thing to hear.
By being told, and accepting we are potentially not good enough to achieve our goal, we actually, counter-intuitively, are given the chance to actually have a better shot at achieving it.
And it comes from the basic fact of choice.
We’re put at a crossroads when we are told we are not good enough. It is a triple fork in the road. You can stop and give up, you can continue on as is, or you can reassess what you have been doing and make the conscious effort to continue, to better understand your position, strengths and weaknesses, and take appropriate action.
“What is freedom?” wrote the poet Archibald MacLeish, “Freedom is the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.”
The power of choice is one of the most important pieces of decision making we have. It puts control of our lives back into our hands. It is driven by our willpower and our desire to do what we want, to get what we want out of life, and it gives us the power to take back control of our lives, even if for a single task.
Epictetus reminded his students that there were things outside of their sphere of control and to be indifferent to the things they could not control. But choice, holding the power to choose how to respond, that was within our control.
So maybe we aren’t good enough at a certain moment in time. Maybe we’re not achieving our goals like we wanted to or thought we would. We are now at our fork of choice:
Do we give up?
Do we proceed as we have?
Or do we take these failings as learning experiences and absorb them to reach our potential?
Every situation, just as every individual, will have a different answer to these question—no situation or person is the same. We can only overcome these setbacks with true analysis of the situation. Those who don’t want the analysis will take routes one or two, giving up or continuing on how they see.
But for those who understand they have power in choice, who understand that failure is a sign for future potential, they will choose option three. Option three provides guidance. It provides power. It provides possibilities of success.
“The ability to choose well is arguably the most powerful tool for controlling our environment,” wrote the Columbia University professor Sheena Oyengar in her book The Art of Choosing.
The choice is yours. You just need to know what you want and choose that option.
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo