Is “good enough” actually good enough?

Let’s start with one of the most popular quotes on gym walls, office posters and LinkedIn posts: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle.

Great quote. Not Aristotle.

It was written in 1926 by an American writer called Will Durant, in a bestselling book called The Story of Philosophy. Durant was summarising Aristotle’s ideas in his own words. Somewhere along the way, people forgot the “summarising” part, and Durant’s sentence got Aristotle’s name stamped on it, forever. It’s been on mugs for decades.

To be fair, it’s a decent summary. Aristotle’s real version, in an old public domain translation, is a little less snappy: “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” Same idea. You don’t become good by thinking about being good. You become good by practising. But the Instagram version is a 1920s American, not a 4th-century Greek.

Now the second one. “Good enough.”

Today, “good enough” usually means one of two things. Either it’s a nice, relaxing permission slip, you don’t have to be perfect, you’re good enough, which is sweet. Or it means settling: doing the minimum, not bothering, “eh, it’s good enough,” with a shrug.

The phrase comes from Donald Winnicott, the English paediatrician and psychoanalyst we’re meeting in this chapter. He talked about the “good-enough mother.” And what he meant was neither the shrug nor the permission slip.

His idea was much more interesting. At the very beginning, he said, a mother (or whoever’s looking after the baby) adapts almost completely to the baby’s needs. Hungry? Fed. Cold? Warm. Upset? Held. That’s an enormous amount of work, and it’s anything but the minimum. But then, gradually, the parent starts to fail. A little. They take a bit longer to come. They don’t get it exactly right every time. And that failure isn’t a problem. It’s necessary. It’s how the baby slowly learns that the world doesn’t revolve around it, and that it can cope.

So “good enough” doesn’t mean “do less.” It means: give a lot, and then let yourself be imperfect, in small, survivable doses, because a perfect parent would actually be bad for the child.

And while we’re here, here’s a Winnicott line that sounds made up, but isn’t. He once stood up at a meeting of psychoanalysts and said: “There is no such thing as a baby.” People were horrified. What he meant was that you never see a baby on its own. Wherever there’s a baby, there’s someone looking after it. A baby isn’t a separate little person yet. It’s half of a pair.

Shocking line. Lovely idea.

Meet Donald Winnicott. Born in Plymouth, England, in 1896, into a comfortable family. He trained as a doctor, served on a navy ship in the First World War, and then became a paediatrician, a children’s doctor, at a hospital in London called Paddington Green. He worked there for forty years. Over his career, he saw tens of thousands of babies and their mothers. Sitting in his clinic, watching how parents held, fed, calmed and played with their children, he learned things that no theory had taught him.

He also trained as a psychoanalyst. And here’s a nice callback: his analyst for ten years was James Strachey, the man who translated Freud into English and gave us “id,” “ego” and “parapraxis.” Later, Melanie Klein supervised his work. But when the British psychoanalysts split into camps, Winnicott refused to join either side. He was one of the independents in the middle.

He was also a bit of a character. There’s a story that he used to cycle down a steep London hill with his feet up on the handlebars, well into middle age. And in the 1940s and 50s, he gave a series of talks on BBC radio, speaking directly to ordinary mothers in plain, warm, everyday language, telling them that they knew more than the experts thought. That was revolutionary at the time.

So what did he say?

First, holding. A baby needs to be held, literally, in arms, but also in a wider sense: a safe, reliable environment where its needs are met and it doesn’t have to worry about falling apart. Winnicott called this the holding environment. And he thought adults need it too. A good friendship, a good therapist, a good workplace: they all “hold” you in some way.

Second, the good-enough mother: a lot of care at the start, then gradual, survivable failure, so the child learns to cope with a world that isn’t perfect.

And he was brutally honest about how hard that is. In one famous paper, he made a list of eighteen reasons why a mother might sometimes hate her baby, right from the beginning. The baby is demanding, exhausting, ungrateful, it hurts her body, it interrupts her life. He wasn’t saying mothers don’t love their babies. He was saying that love and frustration live together, just like Klein said, and that pretending otherwise only makes parents feel more guilty. Your friend texting at 3am, convinced she’s failing? Winnicott would have said: you’re not failing. You’re exhausted. That’s different.

Third, the transitional object. That teddy bear, blanket or scrap of fabric a small child refuses to let go of, the one that has to come everywhere and absolutely cannot be washed. Winnicott said it’s incredibly important. It’s the child’s first possession that’s “not me,” but not fully “not me” either. It helps the child bridge the gap between being one with their parent and being a separate person. And he gave parents a lovely rule: never ask the child whether they found the teddy or created it. Just let it be both.

He believed that same in-between space, between your inner world and the outside world, is where all play, art, creativity and culture happen for the rest of your life.

And fourth, the idea that’s most relevant to your five takes of a voice note: the true self and the false self. A baby whose needs are met well enough can just be: spontaneous, real, alive. But if a child grows up in an environment where they have to constantly adapt to other people’s needs, they build a false self: a polite, compliant, people-pleasing version that keeps everyone happy. Everyone has a bit of a false self. It’s what lets you be nice to your boss. But if it takes over, people often say they feel empty, unreal, like they’re performing their life instead of living it.

Sound familiar? The five takes of the voice note. The deleted post. The apologies for perfectly good food. That’s not just perfectionism. Winnicott might ask: who are you performing for?

Meet Aristotle. Born in 384 BC in a small town in northern Greece, the son of a doctor to the Macedonian king. At seventeen, he went to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy, and he stayed for about twenty years. He was Plato’s star student, and then, in very Greek fashion, he spent much of his career disagreeing with him.

Later, he was hired to tutor a teenage boy who would grow up to be Alexander the Great. Then he came back to Athens and opened his own school, the Lyceum, where he’s said to have taught while walking up and down a covered walkway, which is why his followers were called “the Peripatetics,” roughly, “the walkers.” He wrote about absolutely everything: logic, politics, poetry, physics, and biology. He dissected animals and described hundreds of species. Ancient writers also say he had a lisp, small eyes and thin legs, and dressed very fashionably, with lots of rings. A stylish genius.

And when Athens turned against him after Alexander’s death, he reportedly left the city saying he wouldn’t let Athens sin against philosophy twice. The first time, of course, was Socrates.

The book we need is the Nicomachean Ethics, named after his son, Nicomachus. It asks the biggest question of all: what is a good life?

Aristotle’s answer is a Greek word, eudaimonia. It’s often translated as “happiness,” but that’s not quite right. It means something more like flourishing: living well, becoming the best version of what a human being can be, over a whole lifetime. Not a feeling you have on a Saturday. A life that’s going well.

And here’s a real Aristotle line, which you’ve probably used without knowing it came from him: one swallow does not make a summer. He meant that one good day, or one good act, doesn’t make a good life. It takes time, and practice.

That’s where habit comes in. You become generous by being generous, brave by doing brave things, just like you become a musician by playing music. That’s the idea Will Durant summarised so well that his summary stole the credit.

And then, the big one: the golden mean. Aristotle said that every good quality sits between two bad extremes, one of too much and one of too little.

Courage sits between cowardice, too little, and recklessness, too much. Generosity sits between stinginess and throwing your money around. Honesty about yourself sits between boasting and false modesty. And being good-tempered isn’t about never getting angry. Aristotle said it’s about being angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way. And he added: that’s not easy.

But the mean isn’t the exact middle. It’s the middle for you. He gave a funny example: if ten pounds of food is too much for a normal person and two pounds is too little, that doesn’t mean everyone should eat six. A famous wrestler of the time would need far more than a beginner. The right amount depends on who you are and what you need.

Now look at the beginning of this chapter through Aristotle’s eyes.

The five takes of the voice note, the deleted post: that’s too much. The pan soaking since Tuesday, the report you never read: too little. Not applying for the job because you only meet eight requirements out of ten? That’s false modesty, one of the two extremes. Apologising all evening for perfectly good food? Same. The person who meets four requirements and applies anyway, and tells everyone they’re perfect for it? The other extreme.

And somewhere in between, there’s the mean: you check the message once, send it, and move on. You apply for the job. You serve the dinner and say “I hope you like it.”

In other words: good enough.

Tonight: an English children’s doctor who cycled with his feet on the handlebars, versus a Greek philosopher with a lisp and a lot of rings.

So who wins?

No winner, but a very useful answer to our question. “Good enough” isn’t the minimum. It’s the right amount. Perfect is too much. “It’s fine” with the pan soaking since Tuesday is too little. Good enough sits in between, and it’s different for each person and each situation.

So next time you’re on the fifth take of a voice note, try asking two questions.

Aristotle’s: is this the right amount, or have I gone past it?

And Winnicott’s: who am I actually performing for?

Then send the voice note. First take. Apply for the job, even with eight out of ten. Serve the dinner without apologising.

And if you mess up a little along the way, remember Winnicott’s whole point: small, survivable failures aren’t a sign that you’re doing it wrong. They’re how everyone, including you, gets to grow.

The misquotes: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” was written by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy (1926) as a summary of Aristotle’s ethics; it is not Aristotle’s own sentence. Aristotle’s version is that “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book II).

Winnicott’s “good-enough mother” does not mean doing the minimum; it describes near-complete adaptation to an infant’s needs at first, followed by gradual, manageable failure that supports the child’s development.

Donald Winnicott (1896–1971): English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who worked at Paddington Green Children’s Hospital for forty years. He belonged to the Independent group of the British Psychoanalytical Society, between the Kleinians and the followers of Anna Freud, and reached a wide public through his BBC radio talks to parents.

Winnicott’s key ideas:

• “There is no such thing as a baby”: an infant cannot be understood apart from the care it receives.
• The good-enough mother: a caregiver who adapts closely to the infant at first and then gradually less, allowing the child to tolerate frustration and develop (“Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 1953).
• The holding environment: a reliable, safe setting, physical and emotional, that allows development.
• Hate in the counter-transference: in a 1947 paper, Winnicott listed eighteen reasons a mother may hate her baby, arguing that acknowledging such feelings is healthier than denying them.
• Transitional objects: a child’s first “not-me” possession, such as a blanket or soft toy, which bridges inner and outer reality. The same intermediate space underlies play, creativity and culture (Playing and Reality, 1971).
• True self and false self: the true self is spontaneous and feels real; the false self develops through compliance with others’ demands. Some false self is normal and necessary, but when it dominates, people may feel empty or unreal (“Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” 1960).

Aristotle (384–322 BC): Greek philosopher, student of Plato, tutor to Alexander the Great and founder of the Lyceum. His Nicomachean Ethics argues that the goal of human life is eudaimonia, flourishing over a whole life (“one swallow does not make a summer”). Virtues are developed through habit and practice. Each virtue lies at a mean between excess and deficiency, for example courage between rashness and cowardice, and truthfulness about oneself between boastfulness and false modesty. The mean is relative to the person and situation, not an arithmetic middle, and finding it requires practical wisdom (phronesis).

Where they meet: Both reject perfection as the goal. Both see growth as gradual and practical, developed through experience rather than rules, and both locate the good in an appropriate amount rather than in extremes.

Where they differ: Aristotle emphasises reason, practical wisdom and habituation as the route to excellence. Winnicott emphasises early care, safety and play as the conditions that allow a person to feel real and to develop at all. Aristotle also held views on women’s reasoning that Winnicott’s work, centred on mothers’ knowledge, implicitly challenges.

Further reading:

• Winnicott’s The Child, the Family and the Outside World (1964), his BBC talks for parents. Warm, clear and still widely read.
• Playing and Reality (1971), for his ideas on transitional objects, play and creativity.
• Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, on habit and the mean. W. D. Ross’s translation is public domain.
• Winnicott: Life and Work by F. Robert Rodman, a detailed biography.