The best is the enemy of the good: how to give up striving for the ideal and be happy here and now

We are accustomed to the idea that eternal striving for the best and constant dissatisfaction are necessary for success. But what is success anyway? More and more people are suffering from depression and anxiety. Loneliness and social isolation have reached epidemic proportions. According to surveys, two-thirds of employees experience burnout. Doesn't sound like success.

There is also another approach. As the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Tit Nath Khan says, real success means being satisfied with the way your life unfolds. This is "the ability to find happiness in work and life here and now." The essence of such success is not to achieve the ideal. It is different: to accept what is, what is "good enough." The interesting thing is that when we stop striving for the ideal every minute, we not only become happier, but also develop.

With this outlook on life, confidence increases and stress decreases, as the constant feeling that you are not good enough disappears.

And it also reduces the risk of undermining your emotional or physical health, because you do not need to put in a heroic effort every day to become better than someone. You just need to do your job well enough over and over again. As a result, we are seeing steady progress.

A great example of this philosophy is Eliud Kipchoge, the world record holder in marathon running. He is literally the best at what he does. However, he says that his key to success is not to exhaust himself in training. He is free from the fanatical desire to always be better than others. Instead, it just tries relentlessly to perform well. According to him, in training, he rarely uses more than 80-90% of the maximum of his capabilities. This allows him to exercise regularly week after week. “I want to run with a relaxed mind,” says Eliud.

Unlike many other athletes who tried and failed to break the world record for marathon running, Kipchoge was never obsessed with this goal. For him, running is “here and now”, not a desire to meet ever-growing expectations. “When I run, I feel good. My mind feels good. I sleep well and enjoy life,”the athlete shares.

The less we strive to be happy, the happier we feel. The less we try to show the best result, the better we get.

Think back to your own experience. In the moments when you were happiest and showed your best results, were you chasing something or, like Kipchoge, were you calm and happy with what you were doing? Of course, this does not mean that you don't have to try to get better at all. Vice versa. Just use different principles for this.

1. Accept your point of reference

“Train based on the shape you are in now. Not the way you think you should be, or the way you want to be, or the way you were before,”advises ultramarathon runner Rich Roll.

We often convince ourselves that our condition is better than it actually is. We distract ourselves with other things and ignore the present state of affairs. This protects against pain in the short term, but does not lead to anything good in the long term, because we do not solve the problem, but avoid it. Inadequate athletic performance, feelings of loneliness in a relationship, or burnout at work may be the problem. In any area, progress requires seeing and accepting your point of reference.

“Acceptance does not mean passivity and resignation,” writes John Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine and author of books on meditation. - Not at all. This means that you need to understand the situation and accept it as fully as possible, no matter how difficult or terrible it may be. And to understand that events are what they are, regardless of whether we like them or not. According to him, only then can you improve your situation.

2. Be patient

We want to get results right now, but that usually doesn't happen. Let's take weight loss. Many people change from one fancy diet to another, try a high-carb diet, then a paleo diet, then an intermittent fast. But this does not help, but only interferes with losing weight. The researchers compared low-fat and low-carb diets by observing participants over the course of a year. It turned out to be more important not what kind of diet a person has, but how much he adheres to it.

In the long term, success depends on small but gradual changes.

The same can be said for other areas of life, be it athletic performance or happiness. If you rush too much or wait too early for results, you will be frustrated over and over again.

3. Be in the present

Today's society celebrates optimization. Naturally, we want to optimize ourselves as well. But our brains don't work the same way as a computer. When we try to complete several tasks at the same time, he either quickly switches from one task to another, or tries to process several tasks at once, directing a small amount of mental faculties to each. And although we think we are doing twice as much, in reality, our efficiency is reduced by almost half.

Moreover, we feel less happy. Scientists have proven that we are happier when we are completely immersed in what we are doing and are not distracted by extraneous thoughts.

Unfortunately, now we are constantly distracted by something. It seems to us that we will miss something important if we are not online 24 hours a day - and so we go to social networks, check mail, open news. But, perhaps, everything is exactly the opposite: constantly being on the Web, we miss real life.

4. Be vulnerable

On social media, people try to imagine their life as ideal. But this illusion is far from harmless. As a result, most people think that only they are experiencing problems - which means that something is wrong with them. This misconception leads to additional stress. Moreover, trying to conform to the image that we cultivate on social media creates anxiety and cognitive dissonance - a contradiction between two ideas about ourselves, public and personal.

Stop striving so hard for invulnerability and be yourself.

As sociologist Brené Brown says, when we put all of ourselves into what we do, we feel better. We not only get rid of exhausting dissonance, but we also create more sincere connections with people, we get more support. Trust arises when you relax and are not afraid to appear vulnerable. Then others can do the same.

5. Maintain a circle of offline friends

Perhaps one of the most damaging consequences of the spread of digital technology is the illusion of connection with other people. It seems that if you can quickly write a tweet, a message in a messenger or a blog post, then everything is in order. Digital communication saves time and effort that would have to be spent to arrange a real meeting at a convenient time for everyone. And that allows us to be hyper-productive - at least that's what we say to ourselves.

But nothing can replace personal communication, and by refusing it, we harm ourselves. As psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz write in The Lonely American, the growing obsession with "productivity and the cult of employment" has led to dramatic shrinking communities, increasing social exclusion and related affective disorders. We need personal communication and touch, they affect the feeling of happiness, calmness and even relieve pain.

Face-to-face communication also has a positive effect on our efficiency. When it comes to changing habits, technology cannot be compared to the help of real friends. For example, former New York Marathon champion Shalan Flanagan has said more than once that the people she trains with contribute to her success. “I don’t think I would have continued running if not for my training partners,” she said. "They support me during the ups and downs." So the effort required to have regular face-to-face communication is well worth it.