If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here.

This past Sunday evening as I was pulling out our trash and compost bins to put them on the curb, I felt a delightful flash of pleasure.

It wasn’t necessarily because of taking out the garbage, but it also wasn’t not because of taking out the garbage. My contentment was the culmination of a fairly nice few days that I was reflecting on as the weekend ended. 

On Thursday I took a rare weekday off so that my husband and I could go to an RV show with two of our dearest friends and have lunch on a downtown restaurant patio on what turned out to be an unexpectedly gorgeous day. That night I attended a self-defense workshop, where we practiced choke holds and how to break them, and I left winded and tired, with bruises up and down my arms from where my grappling partner had been exceptionally good at breaking my hold, and feeling empowered and confident.

Friday night the hubs and I took our first pottery class, where we struggled to throw recognizable cups and bowls in our virgin attempt on a pottery wheel, and laughed at our own failed attempts.

On Saturday we dropped into an open house for our trainer’s new gym, where we ran into a good friend and spent some time chatting with her before we had to get back home so I could do a virtual presentation for a writers’ organization. That afternoon a neighbor came over to assemble and deliver welcome bags to new residents as part of our community’s newly formed welcome committee, and we spent a couple of hours chatting and getting to know each other as we worked.

Sunday I played pickleball with some girlfriends, a recent activity five of us have started together, and we stayed afterward for a beer and a little catching up. When I got home I took out the garbage so my husband wouldn’t have to, and that evening we watched TV until bedtime.

It doesn’t sound like all that exciting a weekend, does it? Nothing special, just ordinary activities, none of them especially significant or memorable. And yet as I rolled out the trash cans I felt that warm flush of satisfaction.

Medium and the Demons

This awareness and simple enjoyment of average things is a relatively new skill for me. I was raised, as a lot of us were, in the quintessentially American environment of chasing peak performance and experiences. Our vocabulary was one of superlatives and stack-ranking: the best, the most, the worst, the least. If your answer to “How are you?” was anything less than a hearty “Great!” it was cause for concern.

Also like a lot of us, that environment created in me a ruthless sense of perfectionism. It wasn’t enough to try my best; I also had to be the best. It raised the bar not just on me, but on everything I experienced. If something wasn’t “the best” or “the most,” there was clearly something wrong. 

If we always have to be the best, that means we must be constantly monitoring everyone around us to figure out where we land in the pecking order. It’s draining and counterproductive to creativity and authenticity, and means the measure of our happiness rests on outside forces and other people, rather than ourselves and our own enjoyment.

The predictable and inevitable result was that anything that wasn’t a peak experience felt inadequate and unsatisfying. I was my own wet blanket, stifling the ample joy to be had from ordinary events in life.

It also engendered comparison and competition, two more of my demon cadre (Hey, demon buddies, how’s it going?), because if I always have to be the best, that means I must be constantly monitoring everyone around me to figure out where I land in the pecking order. It’s draining and counterproductive to creativity and authenticity, and means the measure of my happiness rests on outside forces and other people, rather than myself and my own enjoyment.

Read more: “On Writing Authentically and Pursuing the Perfect Smile”

Tim Urban, in one of his often insightful posts in his Wait but Why blog, refers to life’s series of ordinary events as “mundane Wednesday,” and they make up the bulk of our existence. If we’re unable to let ourselves savor and enjoy those ordinary, medium experiences, we are relegating ourselves to feeling vaguely unhappy and dissatisfied in the vast majority of our time.

Medium and the Muse

Most of the actual day-to-day effort of our creativity tends to be medium-level satisfying. We’re not kissed by the Muse every day, but neither are we probably stinking the joint up on the regular. Although occasionally we may have transcendent days of flow or frustrating days of failure, generally our efforts fall somewhere in between—as far as both the joy we take in doing them and the result. Most of our writing days are okay.

Then we work to hone those medium results in a constant effort to make them exceptional. Sometimes we succeed. More often we simply make them pretty good: entertaining or enjoyable or engaging enough to satisfy us, to garner an agent or a publishing contract, to please readers.

And yet how often do we remember to relish these simple pleasures of our creativity? Even on my most medium days of writing and creating, it’s still what I’d rather be doing than most anything else. It’s still satisfying and challenging and interesting.

How often do we savor the product of our effort, or the impact our work has on others? It’s so easy to get hung up on the fact that we have not achieved our pinnacle goals like becoming a New York Times bestseller, having millions of readers, joining the pantheon of authors who become household names and whose works endure for generations, that we fail to appreciate the fact that our work is out there in the world at all, being read by strangers.

It’s so easy to get bent out of shape over a single one-star review and discount the value of the rave review an Amazon reader left that said they loved it—or even the stack of three- and four-star reviews that say the readers found the story to be good, enjoyable, worth their time. What’s wrong with that?

Read more: “Are you ‘Just’-ifying Your Writing?”

I’m old enough to remember a time when a three-star review of something was literally labeled “good,” four was labeled “great,” and five stars was considered “excellent.” Most positive reviews awarded three- and four-star ratings—”good” and “great” were still rock-solid ratings, and it was a rarefied thing indeed that merited a rating as nearly perfect, as good as it got, transcendent.

When Amazon and other rating sites first began to gain popularity, I remember being bewildered at authors who got upset with anything less than a five-star review. Be truthful: On an objective scale of 1 to 5, how many books, movies, meals, or other experiences have you had that are actually fives? I can name a handful. If everything is considered to be peak perfection then it loses all meaning, like the “everyone gets a trophy” mindset that undermines our sense of what accomplishment truly is.

Read more: “Measure Your Success By What You’re Doing, Not What You Want to Do”

My weekend was a three-star weekend–quite good, not spectacular. I’m not going to be on my deathbed harking back to it as one of the highlights of my life. But it’s a brick in the overarching structure of my life that, laid together with a whole lot more of those nice steady bricks, helps build it solid and strong.

Yes, so many of our most memorable life experiences are the peaks and valleys, but they do not make up the fabric of what our life means or how we live it. Most of life is mundane Wednesday, aggregating together to create much greater impact on how happy and fulfilling your life is overall than those infrequent outliers. 

Most evenings Joel and I wind up at home as we did Sunday evening, sitting together on the sofa, often holding hands or cuddling while we watch fairly forgettable TV or movies. Sure, every now and then we might see or do something extraordinary, but for the most part it’s medium. Yet night after night, week after week, year after year, it creates an overall powerful sense of connection and contentment in our marriage.

Finding the Magic of Medium

Once in a while I have a truly exceptional experience with my work: an edit that helps an author transform a story into something astonishing, or the development of a new theory or technique that I think is especially insightful or original, or piece of writing or a presentation that’s as good as anything I’ve ever done.

Peak experiences aren’t what build a career or reputation, and nor are they the main components of a creative’s deep satisfaction with what they do. It’s the day-in-and-day-out work that serves both those purposes.

But those aren’t the experiences on which I’ve built my career or my reputation, and nor are they the main components of my deep satisfaction with what I do. It’s the day-in-and-day-out work that serves both those purposes. My dull, ordinary mediums. If I defined my success and happiness by only the peaks, I would spend an awful lot of time feeling discouraged and inadequate—as in fact I have in the past, and occasionally do even now when I forget the magic of mundane Wednesday.

I don’t always remember to notice and appreciate the mediums, but I’ve been thinking about these ideas as I work on a new presentation this week that I’m reasonably happy with. Is it the greatest presentation that’s ever been done, or even that I have ever done? Probably not. But I like it, I’ve had a good time working on it, and I think it offers practical, actionable, useful information to authors. It’s good enough.

I’m reflecting on them as I write and edit this very blog post, not sure whether it fully and perfectly expresses these thoughts and how they pertain to writers and creative work. I don’t think it’s the best post I’ve ever shared, or the most well written. But I think it expresses well enough what I was trying to say, and I hope it may be helpful to at least some authors. It’s good enough.

And—at least today, on this mundane little Thursday—that’s good enough for me.

How about you, authors—do you remember to notice and appreciate the “good enough” in your own life? How do you remember to take satisfaction in the pleasures of mundane Wednesday—or are you always focused on the brass ring? Do you battle with the “good enough” demons: perfectionism, comparison, competition, impostor syndrome? How do you cope with those episodes?

If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here.