Welcome to Good Enough

It took me three years to figure out what to call this newsletter

I’ve been writing this newsletter for 3 years, and it's been called “Max’s Newsletter” the entire time. To be honest, I had no real thought behind the name, and always just viewed it as a placeholder that I told myself I would figure out at some point. That point kept not coming, and I stopped thinking about it.

But I’ve been sitting with this question of what and who this newsletter is really for. What am I trying to say when I sit down and write? I kept landing on the same thing: the idea that you do not have to have it all figured out to be worth something. That where you are right now, in the middle of all of it, still counts, and that you can want more and appreciate what you have without those 2 things being in conflict.

That’s what I’ve been writing about for 3 years, and I just never gave it a name until now.

This newsletter is now called Good Enough.

The why behind it

I want to be clear about what I mean that good enough isn’t about settling. It’s not deciding that you have peaked or that ambition is overrated. It’s something harder than that, which is choosing to believe you are already worth something right now, before you hit the next milestone, before the thing you are building finally arrives, before you have proof it was worth it.

Most of us are running around trying to earn that feeling. Hit the number, get the promotion, reach the subscriber count, and then you will feel like enough. But the feeling never comes the way you expect, and the goalpost moves, and you are back to running. I have done this more times than I can count, and in many ways, I’m still there.

What I have slowly figured out, and am still figuring out, is that striving and being enough are not opposites. You don’t have to pick one, and you can be proud of what you’ve built and still want to build more. You can be in the middle of something hard and recognize that you are doing okay. These things both can be true (shout out to Alex Dobrenko`).

Why I started this in the first place

I started writing because I was tired of the version of the internet that only shows the destination. The clean lesson, the redemption arc, the story that only gets told once it has a tidy ending. I wanted to write about the middle part, where you are still tired and still going, where you don’t have the answer, but you’re sitting with the question anyway.

That’s where most of us live, and I think it deserves more company.

A lot of you have told me over the years that something in these posts felt like a mirror. People going through burnout who needed to hear that the messy version of recovery is still recovery. People who built something that looked right on paper and still felt something was off. If that has been you, this newsletter has been for you the whole time, and the name is just finally catching up.

Good enough to show up, good enough to keep going, and good enough to share the unfinished version of yourself and trust that it’s worth something.

Same newsletter, same writing, just a name that finally fits.

Thanks for reading,
Max