Not everything has to be everything. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. Good enough is good enough.
Everyone wants a 4.0, an A-plus. But B-plus is fine and so, honestly is a C. Average is better than below average, so why not be satisfied with the satisfactory?
The constant push to upgrade is exhausting. Continuous improvement just means you never get to relax. It’s okay to settle for what you liked last time; if it was adequate then, it’s adequate now. Progress is also not going backwards.
Sure, there’s always a better table, a tastier dish, a superior route. But so what? If you’ve got a place to sit, a bite to eat, and some way to get home, isn’t that plenty?
All comparisons are odious is how I remember Chekhov’s quote, and if it wasn’t the Russian playwright who said it, or if that isn’t quite what he said (or both), I’m not going to lose sleep over it—and I certainly wouldn’t wear a watch that told me if I were, simply in the name of optimizing the potentially optimal.
At some point, you’ve just got to accept the acceptable, without continuing to long for something better. You’ll never be satisfied with what you don’t have, until you’re satisfied with what you do. Ye olde wanting what you have vs. having what you want. Or something like that.
The secret to living a life of no regrets is to regret nothing and the only way to do that is to realize that you couldn’t really have done anything different than what you did. Giving up on free will is a small price to pay for a life well-lived; if you couldn’t have lived any differently—(and guess what? You couldn’t!—then it’s all good (and bad, and indifferent, as well).
Nothing is perfect; in fact, ONLY nothing IS perfect; as soon as there’s anything, it’s inevitably flawed; this, too, was better before being written.