Introduction

Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.

—J. K. Rowling

Many top major league baseball players fail 70 percent of the time. Batters with over a .300 average, which is considered very good, still strike out at least seven out of ten times they are up at bat. Professional basketball players are considered at the top of their game if they make 50 percent of their shots. That means that half of the time, they miss the hoop.

In the NFL, a professional quarterback who completes 60 percent of his passes is considered the most elite in the game. That means 40 percent of the time, the quarterback fails at his job.

Failing is so integral to sport that it is woven into the success of any athlete. Wardell Stephen Curry, who brought the Golden State Warriors their first NBA championship in forty years, said it best:

“I’m not the guy who’s afraid of failure. I like to take risks, take the big shot.”

If you have seen Curry play, you’ve noticed that he likes to take the high-risk shot, sometimes from half-court, and he often makes it.

Curry’s college coach at Davidson, a small Division 3 school, saw the no-fear quality in the star early on. “He had no fear of failure,” Bob McKillop said. “If he missed a shot, missed five shots, he didn’t care. It didn’t disrupt him. It didn’t destroy his focus. He knew he was going to make the next five.”

Steph Curry uses failure to his advantage. When he had his worst shooting performance in the last two seasons in game two of the NBA finals, Curry and his coach talked only of not letting failure define him.

“I’m not going to let one game kind of alter my confidence,’’ Curry said. “I know that as a team we’re not going to let one game alter our belief that we’re going to win the series. We’ve got to move on and be ready to play a good team that’s ready to go home.’’

Curry’s coach, Steve Kerr concurred.

“It happens to everybody, whether you’re the MVP or a role player. Sometimes the shots don’t go in. Steph will bounce back. He’s a great player.”

Is Steph Curry perfect? No. But is he good enough? You bet.

I look forward to watching him fail with no fear for many years to come.

Tom Brady was drafted into the NFL after playing for the University of Michigan as a backup quarterback for his first two years. The New England Patriots picked Brady in the sixth round. He was the 199th pick in the 2000 NFL draft. Brady thought he would have gone in the first or second round, but he was passed over for six other quarterbacks. He started his first season with the Patriots as the fourth-string quarterback. By season’s end, he was the number one backup. By the next year, he was the starter, and he is still playing at the age of forty. Five Super Bowl rings later and still those who know Brady say the same things about him: He is fearless, he is not afraid of failure, and he remains humble.

Tom Brady is good enough.

I struggled with trying to be perfect—a perfect athlete, wife, mother, and journalist. I was none of these. But I now welcome failure, not as the enemy, but as a roadmap to lead me to greater success. It hasn’t been easy. I had to learn the hard way.

“You’re human,” my therapist said. “It’s okay to make mistakes.”

But from an early age, I was taught the exact opposite.

“I got my report card today,” I remember telling my mother when I started middle school. “Six As and one B+. Look …”

“Well,” Mother said in her perfectionistic, judging, British nanny voice (she really is a former British nanny), “why wasn’t that B+ an A?”

My mother was like Mary Poppins, very strict but very loving, and always pushing her children to do better. Those perfectionistic genes were honed early and continued through high school, as I excelled in the extremely competitive sport of swimming. My parents, both firstborn children, both highly driven, instilled in all of us to try our best and make good decisions, which for a budding perfectionist like myself meant making no mistakes. So it was no surprise that I chose a college major where you cannot make mistakes: journalism. In my first reporting class, the professor laid down the law. “If your story has no mistakes, typos, or any word misspelled, you will get an A,” he said, peeking over his reading glasses as if to say, Go ahead and test me. “One mistake, and your paper will be returned to you with a big red F on the front.”

No pressure there.

He did give his students the option of fixing mistakes and turning the paper back in for a lower grade, but I wasn’t having any of that.

Telling perfectionists that they have to be perfect is like giving them their drug of choice. And I performed well under pressure. But when there was no pressure, there was no performing for me. That is when another “P” word entered my life: procrastination. Perfection and procrastination go together like “peas and carrots,” quoting Forrest Gump.

By the time I graduated, I had perfected procrastination to an art form and left Cal Poly with an unfinished senior project that I finally finished a few years later. Well, seven years later.

I decided on a career in radio, a career where if you mispronounce a word, stumble on a phrase, or forget your traffic anchor’s name, you get called in to the principal’s office, otherwise known as the news director. The by-product of perfectionism and procrastination—anxiety—became my constant companion. I was nervous about whether the equipment was going to work on the air. I worried about how my voice sounded on the air. I was anxious about whether I was fair and accurate in my storytelling. And what about my coworkers—did they think I was a good journalist? The list went on and on.

I remember sitting with the news director who hired me to do sports back in 1993.

“You know, Kim,” he said, “you’re a woman. And as a female sports anchor, you’re going to be held to a higher standard than the men. If you mispronounce a team, athlete, or coach, you’ll lose all credibility. So don’t do it. Ever.”

Consequently, I spent every free moment watching sports, learning the names of every major league baseball, basketball, and football player.

Just when my anxiety was reaching new heights, it became clear that my third child, Connor, was not meeting his developmental milestones. He was a late walker and a very late talker. In time, the word that no parent wants to hear—autism—was discussed as a possible diagnosis.

I went from doctor to doctor, trying to find one who would say that my son didn’t have a neurological disability. But then one day, a developmental pediatrician told me point-blank, “Connor has autism. It’s a serious disability marked by lack of language and social skills. He will probably never drive a car or get married, and you better just accept it.”

That will be $500, please, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. That was my introduction to the world of disability. Driving a car and getting married are two major milestones every parent wants to see his or her child achieve. The possibility those weren’t going to happen threw me into the most perfectionistic anxiety-driven tornado; by the time the twister had left the building, I was sitting in the therapist’s chair, utterly exhausted and depressed.

I found myself on the couch of Dr. Mary Spencer, my therapist, like someone hanging onto the end of a long, fraying rope. Everyone had told me I needed help, but I thought I could manage on my own.

What? Me? I’m perfect. What’s your problem?

By the time I went to see Mary, I had been in a downward spiral for a long time, and it took even longer until I could climb out and see the sun again.

“Anger is really all about fear, not being in control, things not being perfect,” I told Mary, a charmingly calm woman dressed in long flowing clothes with matching shoes. When she told me it was okay that I wasn’t perfect, I went on the defensive. What did she know?

But in reality, my life was far from perfect. Despite hours and hours of speech and behavioral therapy, Connor showed little improvement by age seven. I was so preoccupied with his care that my career as a radio news anchor was floundering. And with my anger at the world, I was not a very nice person to be around. What’s the cure? I thought to myself as I sunk into Mary’s green velvet couch, with a box of tissues next to me. I hoped that she could just give me a pill that would make me happy again.

But no such luck. She gave me homework for the next week.

“You have to go through this week,” she said, “not thinking everything is either perfect or a failure. You have to think of things as good enough.”

“What am I supposed to do, not try?” I asked.

“No, just let yourself off the hook. Think, what you’ve done for that day is good enough.”

I’ll play your game, therapist lady, I thought, but it is not going to work. No one wants good enough.

But in truth, I had become so fearful of doing the wrong thing that I became frozen, paralyzed, unable to make decisions and live a productive life. Those two words, “good enough,” changed my thoughts and eventually changed my life.

In this book, I’m going to tell you how I did it.

If I can do it, so can you.

Like every one of you, I am still a work in progress. I don’t have all the answers. But I have learned some valuable lessons that have helped me live a life that is good enough.