"Good Enough"

My take on optimization culture, unpacked in therapy

In therapy this week (there’s something I never thought I’d be writing in a Substack), I was unloading something that I’d been turning over again and again in my mind for days…

Someone who had asked me for work was now criticizing the way I was doing it.

Let me be clear, this was a creative who had reached out not once, not twice.. three separate times looking for freelance work. After some conversation and vetting, I agreed to bring them in on an internal project short-term. Now, after a handful of hours, they were not only criticizing my approach, but the diplomatic way in which I analyze creative solutions inside my team.

I know that shouldn’t have sent me the way it did.. but it did. Naturally, I kept it together in the conversation — as a woman in a creative industry, you get really good at managing difficult personalities. But after ten years as a business owner, working with hundreds of entrepreneurs, writing a book, launching an accelerator, speaking on stages.. you’d expect that I would have the confidence to tell this person to fuck right off. Or minimally, to disregard their unwarranted feedback.

Instead, that comment burrowed its way into the back of my brain, like some rodent setting up camp, till I had the time and mental bandwidth to address it. I had every credential to dismiss this person, and yet here I was letting this take up space.

Why?

Writing it now, it seems absurd. Yet, the feeling is a familiar one I’ve had for years, and just can’t seem to move past. No matter how far I’ve come, how much money I make, or any other nebulous benchmark, it just never seems to be enough. Here I was letting my inner critic nod its head along to this person’s insults, like I had no say in the matter.

It turns out that this feeling of ‘not enoughness’ is something I share with the vast majority of high-achieving Millennials. It’s a generational hazard — we were taught to respect authority, which often meant assuming we were wrong without any concrete evidence to suggest why, and that constant improvement would eventually earn us our deserved happiness.

It’s why so many of us have an incessant need to optimize — so we walk around with Oura rings, tracking sleep scores like even our rest needs to be productive. It’s not just an accessory, it’s a sign of the times. An emblem of the entire problem. Tech jewelry as external validation. Yet, now that I’m in the habit of wearing it, I can’t seem to take it off (insert obvious Lord of the Rings joke here).

But the thing about obsessive optimization is that we were never taught to recognize small wins — or more importantly, to love who we are without the accolades.

I remember when just being good at what you do was enough. Those were fun times.

Now everyone is a de facto marketer. The bar just keeps moving. Craft used to be enough. Now it’s craft plus visibility plus brand plus consistency plus showing up plus... The list is designed to be infinite.

Hustle culture didn't create the wound, but it keeps it open. The more you achieve, the higher the bar rises. That's the trap.

Here’s the diagnosis I received in therapy (for what it’s worth)..
When your internal critic pops up as a result of an external comment, ask yourself — is what they're saying a reflection of my reality, or theirs? When criticism arrives with audacious confidence, we — especially women, and especially people-pleasers — immediately assume we're in the wrong. But too often, those words say more about the criticizer's own baggage than about us.

The question isn't whether you'll ever be enough to everyone else — it's whether you'll ever feel like enough to yourself. When ambition has been the engine for so long, what does it look like to let fulfillment take its place?

‘Blanky for Life’ by Giselle Dekel