Congratulations on a B+ essay.

When my children were small, I tried to be a perfect parent, but I was failing. Reading British pediatrician and psychoanalyst’s work on “good enough” parenting let me off the hook, and I became a successful parent.

In my mid-fifties, I realized that my career was beginning to plateau and I initially felt a sense of loss, but then I felt set free. I had achieved enough. I could refocus my life on things that mattered more, and I put all the brass rings I thought I’d had to catch in my junk drawer.

Still older now, I have down-sized my life. I dispensed with that collection of stoneware bowls in every size and color that I once thought was so important, and I have hung onto just the very few that are my favorites.

Some things in life are worth striving for an A-; some things are worth of more than the effort to obtain a C. The challenge for us is to decide which are which. Perfectionists are always failures. No one and nothing is ever perfect.

Voltaire got it right: “The best is the enemy of the good.”