This time of year comes with a quiet pressure to perform.
The perfect gathering.
The perfect mood.
The perfect version of ourselves — patient, grateful, present, and somehow untouched by exhaustion or disappointment.
Most of us know better. And yet, every December, we seem surprised when reality doesn’t cooperate.
We tell ourselves the holidays should feel like a Norman Rockwell painting or a Hallmark movie — warm, effortless, resolved. But if you’ve actually watched a Hallmark movie, you know the truth: they’re all built on disappointment, conflict, and things not going according to plan — at least before the picture-perfect ending that adds to my point. But if you think about it, the magic doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from staying in the story.
That distinction matters.
Recently, I was talking with my daughter, who’s studying astrophysics (she’s infinitely smarter than me; she must get it from her mother) — with a “late start” to the game, surrounded by students who seem to “get it” effortlessly. She walked out of a recent final feeling defeated. Not because she gave up, but because she didn’t think she would get the result she wanted.
And here’s what struck me: she’s pursuing a major that is kicking her ass, and she showed up anyway.
She did the work, went to the library, and studied for hours. She walked into an exam she knew would be hard. She stayed in the fight. That didn’t earn her a perfect grade — but it earned something just as real.
We’re quick to define success binarily: pass or fail, win or lose, perfect or ruined. But that framing hides more truth than it reveals. If you score 70%, your gap isn’t 100%. It’s 30%. You know more than you don’t, more than twice as much more. But when you’re focused on getting an 80 or 85 or more, anything less can feel like failure. We tend to fixate on what’s missing and dismiss what’s working — and in doing so, we miss the opportunity to build on it.
The holidays work the same way.
If one conversation went sideways, we likely call the whole gathering a failure.
If one expectation wasn’t met, we tend to discount everything that was.
If it wasn’t perfect, we just assume the good parts didn’t count.
But what if assessment mattered more than judgment?
What if instead of asking, “Was this the perfect holiday I wanted?” we asked, “What worked — and what can I build on?”
Arthur Schopenhauer once said that the task isn’t to see what no one has seen, but to think what no one has yet thought about what everyone sees. We all see the same holidays. The difference is what we choose to notice.
And to me, a 70% Christmas — the one where people showed up, stayed engaged, tried again, and didn’t quit — isn’t a consolation prize. It’s a real success.
And sometimes, it’s the most honest one we’ll ever have.
So if you’re tired, disappointed, or carrying a quiet sense that things didn’t quite measure up this year: pause before you dismiss it all. Look again.
You might find there’s more there than you think. Maybe 70% more.
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
