Perfection is the enemy of good enough, and you may ask how is good enough defined, how can I tangibly understand when something is good enough? Part of the issue with the concept of good enough is that it is abstract, which is why most people favor perfection. Its most often an objective target, easy to see, though hard to hit. In looking at good enough, the opposite is true, which is why so many people wrestle with this idea. Good enough, is a subjective target and that is much easier to hit.
To make this hit home, I want to go all the way back to how you define success, because sometimes the concept of perfection blinds us in the moment to our larger goals. As a leader, success for yourself from a 10,000 foot view is something that most often has nothing to do with what you accomplish on a specific project, how your team executes a new process, or if you won a specific deal. Success more holistically is the sum total of everything you do measured against your long term goals. With that mind, I want you to humor me, and accept the idea that perfection will only hinder you on your journey to achieving success.
There are two key theories discussed in some fashion or another in business school and most places of work. While these ideas are easier to understand in concept, where and how the rubber of these concepts meet the proverbial road can be much harder to comprehend, and at times present a blind spot in our awareness. Additionally, the application of these ideas applied to the daily work you are doing is seldom discussed leading to the common pitfall of striving for perfection when good enough will do.
Diminishing Returns
To summarize, the concept of diminishing returns speaks to the fundamental idea that to get better results regardless of what it is over time, you will need to invest more time for every increment of improvement compared to the last increment of improvement. However, what is lost on most people is that the difference between time investment and the gained improvement is that the cost of the increment is not linear.
All in all, at some point the input (time, money, resources) required to attain more output will increase. While it might take $5 of resources to produce the first 10 widgets, and then $4 to produce the next 10, and $3 to produce the next 10 (your seeing increasing returns and for some things economies of scale to some degree come into play in the beginning of our relational curve line) the next 10 widgets will cost $4, and then the next 10, $8, and the next 10, $20. Once the slope of the line starts to decrease you have now entered diminishing returns. Now this fundamentally makes sense when this rule is applied to production, but we shouldn’t stop there. What if this principle was applied to our use of time, especially our time spent in our crusade of seeking perfection. To apply this concept for time spent, consider a test you will have to take, where the output is the grade you receive and the input is the amount of hours you study to attain that grade.
Following our above example of widgets, you spend 60 minutes to get a 40%, 25 more minutes to get a 65%, 10 more minutes to get a 80%, 5 more minutes to get a 90%, 45 more minutes to get a 95%, 90 more minutes to get a 98%, and 2.5 more hours to get a 100%. Now, the amount of time you decide to spend is directly correlated to the grade you want (pending all other variables held constant) or your goal.
In this example you have two possible goals to consider, what is perfect and what is good enough. Good enough might be determined by understanding what you need to maintain your overall grade in the class or what you think is acceptable so as to not hinder your chances for college admissions, while perfect is a 100%. The question you need to ask yourself is, is the return on the difference between one target grade and another target grade worth the time investment required to get there? Or in other words is it worth spending an extra 2.5 hours studying to get a 100% instead of a 98%?
I use this example to illustrate the concept of how diminishing returns are applied to our time, which can also be applied to the work we are doing in our professional lives. In our example, most people would say the additional 2.5 hours is not worth a 2% increase in grade, when looking at an example like this laid out in front of them. However, their actions tell a different story, a lot of high achievers and leaders choose to spend that 2.5 extra hours in their attempt to attain perfection. What they do not realize is at what cost are they devoting this extra 2.5 hours. Therein lies the second concept that matters in understanding perfect vs good enough, opportunity cost, which we will continue to discuss in part 3.