Is this Good Enough?

by Nick Laight | Aug 3, 2026 | Blog | 0 comments

A few months ago I was under a lot of pressure…

I had to write a very long, very important sales letter for a big project that Heloise and I had been working on.

Now, this is hardly something new for me.

You could say that writing is my bread and butter.

I’ve been doing it almost daily since I was a kid.

At University I wrote poems that I spent hours and hours obsessively crafting…

Then as a young direct mail copywriter I was trained by two legends in the business, Bill Bonner and Mark Ford.

And in the 30 years since then I have written articles, newsletters, eLetters, adverts or sales letters almost daily.

It would be hard to count up how many exactly.

But we’re talking TENS OF THOUSANDS.

Yet there I was, trying to write yet another one… and I was struggling.

Everything looked wrong on the page.

I did draft after draft, but couldn’t get it right.

Then as the deadline raced towards me, I locked myself in my study to get it finished…

And I experienced what you might describe as a…

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

Honestly, without trying to be TOO melodramatic, it’s like a form of madness.

I suddenly doubted all my abilities.

What was even the point, I wondered?

This was NEVER going to work and I’d finally met my match.

I may as well give it all up!

Finally, I crashed out, slept fitfully, and awoke the next day to read it again.

It wasn’t perfect, I thought.

But it was good enough.

And so, with a large amount of trepidation and self-doubt, I let the darned thing go to the designer, ready to put it online and it got results.

Now, if this is how I feel after decades of doing this professionally…

It’s no wonder if you struggle with doubts!

You might have a business project in development where you need to get something ready to put online or send to print.

But you’re agonising over it…

Because it’s just not what you really wanted, or what you think it SHOULD be.

So you delay…

You procrastinate…

You tinker, tweak and make multiple changes…

And you cannot get to a point of readiness.

If so, then I highly recommend that you follow the ‘good enough’ principle that I use in similar situations.

The Story of the ‘Good Enough Mother’

Donald Winnicott was a British paediatrician and psychoanalyst, and one of the most influential figures in child development.

In a 1953 paper he introduced the idea of the ‘good-enough mother.’

He pointed out that in the early weeks after birth, a mother naturally responds very closely to her baby.

She feeds them… holds them… comforts them… protects them…. attends immediately to their every need.

But as the child grows, that perfect responsiveness becomes impossible.

Sometimes the child has to wait.

Sometimes they feel frustrated.

Sometimes the mother misunderstands what they want.

According to Winnicott, these small failures were not necessarily harmful.

By encountering disappointment in a safe environment, the child could slowly learn that the wider world was separate from them and adapt to the reality of that.

They’d realise that frustration was survivable and learn how to soothe themselves.

So he argued that a child does not need a perfect parent… just one who is ‘good enough’.

What Winnicott described in the raising of a child is also a rather good description of what has to happen in the very early stages of your own home business.

In your head, your new idea is brilliant.

You have all kinds of dreams and ambitions for it.

And you want everything to be perfect…

But the world doesn’t work that way….

You will inevitably experience hitches, delays and frustrations that you cannot control.

That’s because your new business baby has never had to survive contact with indifference, criticism, confusing questions and tech problems.

So your ‘baby’ will get teething problems.

Sometimes you just won’t be able to fix them all.

The secret is to learn how to become comfortable with a manageable level of imperfection so that you don’t stall or give up entirely.

But what is ‘manageable imperfection’?

Well, obviously it does NOT mean rushing out any old rubbish and hoping for the best.

For example, entering a prompt into AI and then pasting whatever comes out, with zero further effort…

Launching a website that’s missing essential pages…

Uploading an email-capture page where you haven’t prepared the autoresponder email….

Or uploading a print-on-demand T-shirt with a spelling mistake.

A ‘good enough’ product needs to be capable of delivering the main result you have promised.

It should be functional enough for them to use… and checked carefully enough that there are no glaring mistakes, broken links or missing pieces.

For instance, let’s imagine you have created a digital course that shows people how to start selling products on Etsy.

All the information is correct, and in order, so that someone could follow it to get a result.

But you’re unhappy with the design… the font… the colours… and some of the writing, which is a bit clunky….

Maybe you worry that it needs a private members’ community…

And it could do with more illustrations or infographics.

Well, yes, those things might improve the package.

But you can still launch a basic first version of your course.

As long as it does the job you promised it will!

And once the product is out in the real world, something very valuable happens.

You’ll start receiving real-world feedback!

Customers tell you which parts they like.

They ask questions you had never considered, and show you which instructions are unclear.

This feedback allows you to improve version two, which you could even sell at a higher price.

One way to stop endless tinkering is to try this…

The TWO Deadline Trick

When you are planning your project, give yourself TWO separate deadlines:

Your private deadline – This is the date by which you must stop creating the first version.
Your public deadline – This is the date on which the product, website, newsletter or offer go out into the world and encounter reality.

The Send-Button Test

If you are struggling to decide whether something is ready, try asking yourself these questions:

Does it do the main job I promised?
Is there a serious reason why it cannot go out?
Will any change significantly change the result or experience for the customer?
Can the improvement be made AFTER launch?

This should be even easier to manage if you’re creating a digital product, because you can always update it later.

After launch you can easily correct a spelling error… upload a new module… tweak a section of the sales page… add a new answer to the FAQ.

So there’s no need to panic.

And it could be that – when your baby is out there in the world – the imperfections don’t matter as much as you think.