As the old adage goes, “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.” Are you a perfectionist, or can you move on once something is good enough?
Share why if you wish.
Perfect Or Good Enough?
Asking — and answering — life's interesting questions
As the old adage goes, “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.” Are you a perfectionist, or can you move on once something is good enough?
Share why if you wish.
Good enough.
There are satisficers and maximizers.
Satisificers believe that if you can get much of the product of work done with a little more than a basic amount of effort, you’re doing okay. Move on to the next task or project on your list of things to do.
Maximizers believe that perfection is key most of the time. They go beyond a satisficing and put in a lot of work to get things just right.
If satisficing didn’t allow me to accomplish more — check more things off my list — I’d be a maximizer. But as that is not the case, and I’d rather not stress out too much on making decisions, I am a satisficer.
Since perfection is nearly impossible to achieve, I’d have to say good enough. With the caveat that if the opportunity arises to repeat a process, we don’t settle for the same result but try to do better
There is a saying “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” This seemed strange to me at first, until I gained enough experience to know that to do all of the things we want to do, we can’t try to be perfect. And many times we don’t even have the luxury of good! Sometimes we are starving but need to meet a deadline, so we shove something down your gullet to get through the day. Or we make our bed quickly because we are late. But we do these things, poorly, because they are still important to us. So we don’t do things perfectly, or even good, or else we sacrifice doing some things that are important.