Results may be below ideal

The real title for this should be, “results may be below ideal, and that’s just fine.”  As an engineer I feel like I spent 6 years in school learning all about ideal situations.  When a truck slams on the brakes, how far will the box slide while totally ignoring wind resistance, variations in the truck bed, or whatever?  How long would it take to download a 4 gigabyte movie with an ideal T1 connection?  If you are reading this over a wireless connection, there’s a good chance your wireless access point is running 11 or 54 megabits per second because that’s what the box says.  Unfortunately that’s the theoretical maximum and technically you’ll probably see only half of that.  If you didn’t already know that, it obviously doesn’t really matter that it’s not perfect.  Right?

Well can be ‘Good Enough’

With just a quick search you’ll find all sorts of people and books that say you need to pick one thing and stick with it until it is complete.  A good example would be The Power of Less by Leo Babauta.  I’m not quite finished with the book but I’ve read enough to get the general idea.

I’ve been remodeling my house for over a year now.  I’ve done some great work and I’ve come a long way, but at the same time I feel like it takes much longer than it should.  To boost the rate of my results, I’ve tried staying focused on one task at a time with my house projects.  I’d tell myself, “you can’t start any new projects until this room is clean” or “you can’t paint the other room until you finish the plumbing in the kitchen”.  I couldn’t believe it when my productivity went down!?  By forcing myself to only do one task, the process of fixing up a house became a chore.  I worked on things because I had to, not because I wanted to.  I spent all of my time not working on the house.  If I worked on something else, then I wasn’t following the rules…so I worked on nothing.  Eventually the project would get done and I’d move on, but the process was exhausting.  By the time I got to the project I wanted to do, I already lost interest and didn’t enjoy doing that either.

This past weekend I let my ADD take over.  I pulled up some carpet and laid a few tiles in my living room.  It’s maybe 15% done.  Then I started tearing up some of the floor in my bathroom, it’s about 50% done.  I cleaned up a few things and baked some lasagna.  I put in about 24 hours worth of work this weekend (12 hrs each day).  These are the things I completely finished: cooked 1 meal and cleaned up after it, went to the grocery store, did all of my laundry.  All of my tools for tiling are still in the living room.  My bathroom still has tons of little pieces of linoleum on the floor.  An outsider would say that I spread myself too thin and was working on too many things.  But the truth is, it takes me about 4 hours to work through one bucket of mortar when laying tile.  If I don’t have 5 hours so I can prepare and take a shower afterwards, I can’t start tiling.  So instead of spending half of the weekend doing nothing because I couldn’t get started on more tile, I filled in the gaps with other forms of work.  And the best part was that I was happy the entire weekend.  If I grew bored with something I just moved to something else; I definitely made a large amount of progress.  I’m not worried about my 1/2 organized kitchen because right now I feel compelled to write and I’m certainly not going to feel guilty about it!

The Best isn’t always Better

My point of all this is, the best way to do things might not always be the best thing for you.  Don’t get caught up when someone tells you that there is some scientific evidence that suggests you could be stronger, better, faster, or smarter.  Sometimes under ideal conditions, science has a great point.  But in real life, enjoying the things you do is just as important as doing the things you do.  If you can step back and find joy in the things about yourself that just aren’t that perfect, then you will have taken another step towards infinite happiness.