Doing the Best With What You Have: Cultivating Acceptance

❝It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.❞
-Miles Davis

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the art of improv comedy. He writes, “One of the most important of the rules that make improv possible…is the idea of agreement…to have characters accept everything that happens to them.” Improv works because the actors don’t fight against what has already happened. They use a “Yes. And…” approach to say that this happened, now what?

What works for comedy also works for jazz and other improvised music.

Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock once talked about being on tour with the great trumpeter Miles Davis when Herbie screwed up and played something that didn’t belong or fit with what has been played up to that point. Because it was so bad, he thought the song was ruined. Imagine his surprise when Miles made it sound like that’s what was supposed to happen.

Herbie said it took years to realize how that happened, and it finally came to him. Herbie judged the mistake; Miles accepted the mistake. Once he accepted what happened, he could make a decision about what to do next.

Before talking about acceptance, it’s helpful to take a step back and talk about what acceptance is not. Accepting the cards that you’ve been dealt, your position in life, or your circumstances does not mean you sit around like a doormat and let life happen to you. You don’t need to take on the persona of a helpless victim.

In other words, acceptance doesn’t mean you are helpless.

Instead, acceptance is to accept what has happened so that you can make an appropriate decision going forward.

Think of the information you have available to you as a funnel.

The information you have to make your decisions is based on what happens, including things you wanted to have happen, things you didn’t know happened, and even things you didn’t want to have happen.

Wishing that some stuff didn’t happen, or that something that didn’t happen did, is nonacceptance. It’s akin to ignoring inputs.

Not accepting how things are, rather than how you wish they were, reduces your choices because you’re not taking into account all available information.

One common belief people have is that they’ll start living as soon as they reach their goals or fix their mistakes (which is a specific type of goal). They may start living their lives and allowing themselves to be happy once they get out of college, get into grad school, graduate from grad school, get a job, make partner, get married, have kids, become an empty-nester, retire, and so on.

Goals can be helpful, of course. Yet at their core, goals are a signal that you aren’t where you want to be. A goal can only exist in the future, and yet we can only live in the present. If we live our lives perpetually wishing they were different, we’ll feel tension.

Even as we make progress toward our goals, it never feels good enough. As long as we haven’t met our goals we are admitting to ourselves that our lives aren’t good enough.

But what happens when we reach our goals? Do we feel a great sense of joy and live out the rest of our days contented?

We set a new goal, thus keeping the tension going.

Goals are specific outcomes that exist in the future that we hope to achieve one day. Yet, we know that outcomes are out of our control. There is too much randomness (aka luck and risk) in the world to be able to control everything involved in getting a specific outcome.

It’s time to pause and look back. It might seem as though I’m encouraging you not to pursue meaningful activities because you should just accept your life and avoid goal-setting. So, let’s close the door on those potential misunderstandings.

Acceptance means taking your current circumstances into account when choosing your decisions, and your decisions represent the kind of systems and habits you want to start without focusing on any particular outcome.

In other words, I’m encouraging you to do the best with what you have where you are. The best you can do represents your potential.

My point is that whatever our potential is, we should aim to maximize it. Instead of wishing our potential was higher, we just do the best we can with what we have.

This doesn’t mean that our potential can’t grow over time. In fact, part of your potential is maximizing the chances of higher potential in the future.

One way to view this new framework is to think about fulfilling your potential over time. That is to say, always do the best you can with what you have.

Yet, more realistically, we could say that we ought to strive to get better at fulfilling our potential.

Accepting your circumstances and learning to be content today by doing the best you can with what you have necessarily means living more for today.

The future and the past both exist only in our minds as thoughts, either memories or anticipation. The present moment is all we have.

But this isn’t an excuse to adopt hedonism as your primary philosophy of life. Just because the present moment is all that exists doesn’t mean the future won’t come. Your actions today impact what potential you have tomorrow.

Imagine being able to call up your past self. Imagine the conversation. What would you say? Do you have any complaints or gripes?

Living for today without regard for the future is akin to stealing from your future self.

The trick is to find balance. Live for today while enabling your future selves to be able to live for their day when it arrives.

When life happens, accept it, learn from it, and do the best with what you can where you are.

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