A key concept to understand — everything in life works best when it’s "just right.”
In the children’s story of Goldilocks, a young girl is faced with choices after she finds her way into the home of a bear family. She finds chairs, beds, oatmeal, and many other things. She tries out the chairs finding one too big, one too small, and one just right. The idea of “just right” is a key concept that we surprisingly struggle with.
One of the hardest things to accept is that sometimes life is uncertain. “Yes or no?” “Up or down?” “In or out?” These are questions we sometimes ask to eliminate the messy middle we all dislike. It’s tempting to think of life like a binary choice between this or that, yes or no.
I have found however that instead life works best when in there is a messy middle, a maybe. Your body for example works best when things are just right. You need temperature, red blood cells, white blood cells, sodium, and many other things to be just right. Your body works hard to maintain this “just right”, a process known in healthcare as homeostasis.
However, it’s not just in health. Consider that you can have too little water (a drought) or too much (a flood). You can have too little social contact (loneliness) and too much (overwhelm). Too little stress is boring, too much is traumatizing. You can even have too little money (poverty) or too much (lottery winners often end up worse off).
Even clear cut decisions like “Should I buy this car” aren’t just simple yes or no questions. How bad do you need it? What else would that money be used for? The “just right” idea is that maybe you can get transportation for less while not having to buy the car. Taxi’s, buses, and ride sharing all fall into that messy middle.
Why does this matter? This idea of finding just right is found throughout health and healthcare. You will see this tension again and again about wanting to get rid of the uncertainty, the messy middle and boil life down to a binary choice. Look for that messy middle and ask what’s “just right”.
The key takeaway is that life works best when things are just right, balanced between on extreme and the other. Life is found in the messy middle. That is the Goldilocks Principle.
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