Excerpt from:  USA Today Magazine:  The Best and the Good:

If you’re old enough, you remember the old saying, “The best is the enemy of the good,” a quote from Voltaire, who was not especially cheerful but neither was he particularly wrong, at least in this regard.  The pursuit of the best, or the perfect, as it is sometimes rendered, stymies achieving and appreciating the good.

Consider, for example, the tendency to seek the best in any given situation. The availability, via the internet, of an unbearable depth of information feeds the hunter-gatherer yearning for the best berries, tubers and quail.  Now the hunter-gatherer can be on an endless search for the best of some category or another, when the best is unnecessary and, perhaps, merely a matter of opinion.  The idea that the best is unnecessary may be anathema to some, but it remains that the best is often not necessary or even desirable.

One of my avocations is art.  A drawing in graphite may take many, many hours.  The rough sketches that precede that task are essential. The grade of paper optimal for a drawing that develops over many weekends’ available hours snatched from other obligations is substantially better than the grade required when hashing out composition and other concerns. It might be nice to use very expensive paper for sketches, but it is not necessary and would not affect the quality of my preliminary sketches. On the other hand, a professional artist would discern significant differences between what I consider final-drawing paper and what an expert would use.  The nuances that separate a heavy paper with a high rag content and low acidity might not elude me, but it would undoubtedly escape my limited capability to exploit the fine points. The same point goes for sedentary people who spend exorbitant amounts on the right athletic shoes when the extent of their mileage is from the car to a building, and for people whose taste buds, burned out by tobacco, insist on only the best possible coffee.

The belief that we must find “the best” in any given category, or the best deal in some quest for product or service, often leads to a tremendous investment in hours of research, comparison shopping and, I suspect, a certain degree of unhealthy perseveration. Is it worth an extra ten hours of research and time to save $100 on some product? If the ten hours spent shopping are a form of recreation, it may have been a worthwhile investment. If, on the other hand, you find browsing through stores or haggling with sales people enervating and aggravating, you are operating at a net loss.  A good deal would have been better than the best deal.  Contrary to advertising, the “right” jeans will not change your life or your butt.  Neither will the car you lease, or, in the long run, the extra $75.00 you saved by bullying a sales person who wanted some kind of commission after putting up with your drama for hours. 

There are internal dramas related to this dance between best and good. We are all familiar with the occasional relationship between procrastination and perfectionism.  Indeed, many people like to credit their procrastination to perfectionism, thus displaying their inertia like a merit badge. They can’t help it that their standards are so much better than yours.  If you really cared about that status report, or essay, or cleaning the garage, you’d get caught up in a fugue state of overwhelm, so intoxicated with the idea that each step must be the right one that you create a miniature existential crisis out of organizing the tool bench.  A tool bench in which things are somewhat easy to find and there is space to work is a good thing; the perfectly organized area that never happens is not.

The wrestling between best and good continues in our relationships with others.  If you are married to someone who is kind and lovable and imperfect, and you focus on the latter, you are deciding to be unhappy and worse, you will render a kind and lovable person lonely and hurt. The notion of perfection will drive out the good.  If your child is not the best athlete, scholar, or artist, your family is typical and perhaps normal. This is not bad; the world relies on types and norms.  If you are perpetually trying to make that child be someone else, rather than loving and encouraging the strengths that are there and helping overcome any germinating character flaws, you are letting the notion of the perfect crush the soul of the good.

There is a vast difference between being a narcissist and accepting oneself, flaws and all.  We have to accept our flaws before we can work on them; if we’re caught up in a childish need to delude ourselves that we are just perfect the way we are (ha!) we will never be able to see the opportunity for growth. We will stagnate in our blinders.  Conversely, the preponderance of media seems focused on pointing out areas of deficiency. This is to be expected: people who are comfortable in their own skin will not feel pressured to prove their worth through leasing the best car or wearing the best clothes. News flash: neither you nor I are destined to be the best-looking, most athletic, smartest and most socially gifted fish in the sea.  Even if you were best in one area, eventually someone would surpass you.  Nothing personal, by the way – it’s just the way things go.  I see many clients whose self-acceptance is caught up in being “on top of my game,” however they may describe that game, and thus they cannot enjoy the good parts of life, including relishing the pleasure of competence in the “game.” They can only throw themselves at an impossible goal and glance over their shoulder at the challengers nipping at their heels.  Being the best has ruined any chance of experiencing, and enjoying, the good.

Try this: for a day, or a week, eliminate the word “best.”  Substitute something else: wonderful, exquisite, precious, pleasant, serene, exciting, etc.  Use whatever adjective suits the situation at hand.  Would a delicious dinner with beautiful music be somehow inferior to the “best” dinner?  Would a serene nap in a hammock with your loved one be anything less than a “best” lazy afternoon?  Would watching your precious child sleep, safe and healthy, be a less perfect taste of heaven than some “best” hour of an evening? Take your emotional pulse after a week and see if reducing the emphasis on the best has, remarkably, increased the level of good.

- Dr. Lori Puterbaugh, LMHC, LMFT