The B+ Student

In high school I graduated — barely — with honors.

At the time you had to have a grade point average of over a B as I recall which was over 80.

High school felt fairly easy to me. It seemed more pass-fail to me …. and as long as I passed and could graduate I mostly didn’t care what grades I got.

When I was getting closer to graduation I realized I was razor close to honors and applied myself more.

In the past several months, I’ve realized how often I’ve applied this philosophy to life.

For most things I’ve passed. I won’t list them all here because some may flame me and I’m not always proud of this.

But suffice to say if I can squeak by on some things I’m pretty content.

Part of not getting A’s was not an issue of ability but effort. Was it worth the effort to get an A? For most things, no. Not at all.

And with that I’m ok to just squeak by.

Plus whenever I think about getting A’s in anything it triggers my obsessive perfectionism.

I game it out in my head and all the strategies and efforts and it exhausts me even planning it all.

But I don’t want pass-fail on some key things in my life. I want to stretch and do a bit better.

And it’s been tremendously freeing thinking of just getting a B in most things. I’ve flourished in fact.

So in this new season of life, for key things I’m asking myself:

“What would be a B+ for this?”

If I say A+ real quickly I get flustered. But when I say I wanna be a B or even B+.

And being a B is so much fun and doable and inspiring.