You have big goals. You’d like to run three times a week, automate your meal prep, finally organize your finances into a proper system. Maybe learn piano well enough to play something real, read a book every month, write a book every five years. These goals feel important—they represent the person you’re trying to become. But here’s what’s actually happening: you’re walking 10,000 steps a day. You’re staying on budget. You’re playing piano when you can. You’re listening to long-form interviews with authors every week. You’re writing blog posts consistently. The gap between these two lists creates a constant hum of inadequacy.
This is the tension between acceptance and striving, and it’s exhausting. On one side, there’s the voice that says you should be doing more—that blog posts aren’t books, that walking isn’t running, that listening to authors isn’t the same as reading their work. This voice sounds like ambition, but it functions like shame. On the other side, there’s acceptance, which feels dangerously close to giving up. If you accept where you are, won’t you stop growing? Won’t you become complacent? So you stay stuck in the middle, neither fully satisfied with what you’re doing nor fully committed to changing it.
But what if acceptance isn’t the opposite of growth—what if it’s the prerequisite? The shame and self-judgment that come from feeling “not enough” consume enormous energy. They’re the tax you pay on every accomplishment, the voice that turns “I wrote a blog post” into “but it’s not a book.” When you accept that blog posts are a legitimate form of writing, something shifts. You’re not lowering your standards—you’re seeing accurately what you’re actually building. And paradoxically, that clarity frees up the exact energy you need to do more.
TUNING Design Co. 