Welcome to the Deep Dive. I am genuinely excited
you're joining us for this one today. Oh, absolutely.
It's a great one. Yeah. You know, we always try
to picture you, the listener. You're probably
a lifelong learner, someone who is insanely curious
about how things work. Right. Maybe you're prepping
for a big meeting or just trying to catch up
on a new field. Exactly. But you also absolutely
hate feeling overwhelmed by information overload,
which is why we're here. To cut through the noise.
Right. And to set the mood for today's deep dive,
I'm looking at your video feed right now, and
you've got this amazing backdrop. It looks like
a cozy, kind of dusty library filled with ancient
texts and philosophy books. Yeah, I wanted to
set the scene. We're going a bit historical today.
I love it. So today's topic is a famous aphorism,
one you have definitely heard and probably used.
Perfect is the enemy of good. It's everywhere.
It really is. We are pulling today's insights
from a remarkably concise but really dense encyclopedic
article that traces the entire history of this
exact phrase. The philosophical antecedents,
the modern variations, all of it. Right. And
our mission today is to dissect exactly why the
insistence on perfection often paralyzes us from
implementing perfectly good improvements. And
more importantly, to extract practical, memorable
insights that you can apply immediately. Because
we want to save you time and energy? We all know
that sinking feeling of tweaking a project to
death. Oh, we've all been there. Okay, let's
unpack this. The basic definition laid out right
at the top of our source material is striking
because it frames perfection not as a goal, but
as a roadblock. Yeah, a massive roadblock. The
source suggests that achieving absolute perfection
is, well, it's likely impossible. Therefore,
the relentless pursuit of it shouldn't stop you
from recognizing or completing work that is imperfect
but still highly valuable. And that distinction,
you know, the difference between flawless and
useful is really the crux of the issue here.
It is. In a world of endless information, we
often confuse flawless with useful. We see curated
images of success everywhere. Totally. So we
set a standard that defies reality. And the result
of demanding that flawlessness is almost always
paralysis. Like staring at a blinking cursor
for an hour. Exactly. A useful solution. even
if it has a few rough edges, actually moves the
needle. It solves a problem for you or for someone
else. But a flawless solution that only exists
in your head. Or is perpetually stuck in a draft
folder. Right. Sitting in a draft folder because
it's never quite ready. That helps absolutely
no one. Ouch. I feel personally attacked by the
mention of the draft folder. But it really begs
the question, why is that our default state?
Well, tinkering feels like productive work. As
long as you are endlessly revising. or adjusting
fonts, or doing just a little more research.
Oh, but endless research. Right. You are protecting
yourself from the vulnerability of actually shipping
a finished product. Perfectionism is often just
procrastination wearing a really nice suit. Wow.
That is a harsh but completely necessary reality
check. So where does this idea actually come
from? Because Voltaire usually gets all the credit
for this, right? The French Enlightenment philosopher.
He does. In the English -speaking world, the
most famous attribution points to Voltaire in
1770. Okay, 1770. Yeah, in his work, Questions
sur l 'Encyclopédie, he quoted an Italian proverb.
He wrote, Il meglio è l 'inimico del bene. The
best is the enemy of the good. Right. And he
clearly found the concept compelling because
he used it again in his moral poem, La Beghe.
He wrote about a wise Italian who says that the
best is the enemy of the good. I have a really
hard time believing an 18th century philosopher
was the very first person to realize perfectionism
is a trap, though. Does this go back further?
Oh, it absolutely does. While Voltaire popularized
it, another French philosopher, Montesquieu,
beat him to the punch by several decades. Oh,
really? Yeah, around 1726, in his work Pensée,
Montesquieu wrote something very similar, but
with a slight, incredibly impactful variation.
He wrote, Le mieux est le mortel ennemi del bien.
Translated, that is, the best is the mortal enemy
of the good. Exactly. The mortal enemy. That
shifts the tone completely. It changes the entire
weight of the phrase. By adding the word mortal,
Moscow is emphasizing that perfection doesn't
just oppose the good. It literally kills it.
Yes. The pursuit of the absolute best actively
destroys the perfectly good reality you could
have achieved. It's like assassination by overtinkering.
You aren't just delaying your work, you are murdering
its potential. What's fascinating here is that
the roots of this idea stretch back way past
the French Enlightenment, all the way to the
ancient world. So your library background is
really paying off right now. I told you. Specifically...
We can look at Aristotle and his principle of
the golden mean. The golden mean, the idea of
finding the middle path between two extremes.
Right. And we usually think of the golden mean
in terms of emotional extremes. Yeah. Like finding
the balance between recklessness on one end and
cowardice on the other. Sure. But applying it
to work ethic is a brilliant paradigm shift.
The golden mean counsels against all extremism.
And perfectionism is, by definition, an extreme.
That makes a lot of sense. It is a fundamental
refusal to accept the reality of human limits.
By striving for the absolute extreme of flawlessness,
you abandon the balanced rational middle ground
of creating something good and useful. That totally
reframes how I look at my own to -do list. We
don't usually label ourselves as extremists when
we're just trying to get a project exactly right.
We really don't. But the literature backs this
up, too. The overarching philosophy shows up
vividly in English literature. Most notably was
Shakespeare. Oh, yes. In his tragedy, King Lear,
which was written around 1606, the Duke of Albany
gives this warning. He says, striving to better,
oft we mar what's well. Such a great line. And
Shakespeare hits on the exact same theme in Sonnet
103. He writes, Were it not sinful then, striving
to mend, to mar the subject that before was well.
Striving to mend, to mar the subject. It is a
beautiful, poetic... description of self -sabotage
it really is yeah and to make it feel a bit more
modern for you listening right now think about
a time you were working on a presentation oh
boy you have a perfectly good slide deck the
information is clear the narrative makes sense
but you just keep striving to mend it just one
more tweak right You change the font, you adjust
the margins by a millimeter, you try a new transition
effect, and suddenly the formatting for the entire
deck is completely ruined. You strove to better
it, and you marred what was well. I can actually
speak to that from personal experience. You tell.
I once spent three days reformatting a data report
to make the charts look aesthetically flawless.
And in the process of moving everything around,
I accidentally deleted a crucial column of raw
data that altered the final conclusion. I had
to revert to a saved version from three days
prior. I hit undo on 72 hours of my life. That
is brutal. That is Shakespeare's warning playing
out in real time. Well, here's where it gets
really interesting. Let's transition away from
your dusty library backdrop for a second. Let's
imagine we are now sitting in the middle of a
bustling modern airport terminal. Okay, shifting
gears. I like it. Because the applications of
this concept become intensely practical in the
real world. Before we get to the literal airplanes,
our source introduces a proverb from an 1893
dictionary of quotations said to be of Chinese
provenance that provides a stunning visual. Okay,
what's the quote? Better a diamond with a flaw
than a pebble without one. That imagery perfectly
encapsulates the shift from theory to reality.
Isn't it? A diamond has immense intrinsic value.
Even if it has a flaw, a cloudy spot, or a small
inclusion, it remains a highly valuable gem.
A pebble, on the other hand, might be perfectly
smooth, perfectly round, absolutely flawless
in its execution as a pebble. But at the end
of the day, its intrinsic value is virtually
zero. It's still just a rock. Exactly. When you
apply this to your daily life, a flawed but completed
project, a product launched, a tough conversation
had, a decision made that is your diamond. It
exists in the real world. It has real, tangible
value. An incomplete, theoretical perfect project
that you never finish is just a pebble. You might
have flawless ideas in your head, but without
the flawed reality of execution, they carry absolutely
no weight. I see the logic. But let me play devil's
advocate for just a second. Go for it. I'm looking
around this metaphorical airport terminal we're
sitting in. If I'm getting on a plane I really
want the mechanic who checked the jet engine
to be a perfectionist. Fair point. I do not want
a flawed diamond of an airplane engine. Doesn't
this whole philosophy break down when the stakes
are literally life and death? That is a completely
fair pushback, and context is everything here.
In highly constrained, zero -tolerance environments,
aviation mechanics, structural engineering, neurosurgery,
the good is explicitly defined by extreme precision.
So perfection is the baseline. Or as close to
it as humanly possible, yes. But the trap is
that we take the standard required for a jet
engine and apply it to a weekly newsletter, or
organizing our garage, or writing a first draft.
That makes a lot of sense. Most of us are not
performing open heart surgery at our desks. We
artificially inflate the stakes of our own work
to justify our perfectionism. Precisely. And
what's interesting is that even in life or death
scenarios, speed sometimes still trumps perfection.
Really? Yes. The history of the military and
the tech sector provides a phenomenal example
of this. Robert Watson Watt, who was heavily
involved in the development of radar during World
War II. Huge stakes. Massive stakes. He propounded
what he called a cult of the imperfect. A cult
of the imperfect. I love that phrasing. The guiding
rule of his cult is incredibly pragmatic. He
stated, give them the third best to go on with.
The second best comes too late. the best never
comes. The third best, not even the second best.
Right. Because in a rapidly evolving high stakes
environment like military defense, speed and
implementation are infinitely more critical than
delayed perfection. That makes total sense. If
you wait to engineer the absolute best radar
system, the war might be over before you deploy
it. If you wait for the second best, you've still
lost critical time and likely lives. The third
best is the good improvement that you can implement
today. The enemy isn't going to pause their advance
while you tinker with your prototypes. It's the
ultimate reality check. Perfection is a luxury
you literally cannot afford when time is of the
essence. Exactly. Which brings us perfectly back
to our bustling airport setting and an incredible
assertion from the economist George Stigler.
He famously said, if you never miss a plane,
you're spending too much time at the airport.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, Stigler
is offering a master class in opportunity cost.
Let's break that down for the listener. In economics,
opportunity cost is the potential benefit you
lose when you choose one alternative over another.
In this case, the cost of a flawless travel record
is the hundreds of hours of your life you lose
sitting at a departure gate. Okay, unpack that
a bit more, because missing a plane sounds like
a massive failure to most people. It does, which
is exactly why we overcompensate. Think about
what it takes to never miss a plane over the
course of your entire life. A lot of waiting.
A ton of waiting. To guarantee a 100 % success
rate, to be perfectly prepared for unexpected
traffic, long security lines, or a delayed shuttle,
you might arrive at the airport three or four
hours early every single time you travel. Yeah,
we all know someone who does that. Over decades,
that equates to weeks of your life spent sitting
in an uncomfortable chair waiting to board. Stigler
is arguing that if you are perfectly prepared
for every single variable in your life, you are
wasting a massive amount of your most valuable
resource, which is... Because occasionally missing
one plane in a 10 -year span is actually a cheaper
price to pay than wasting weeks of your life
sitting in a terminal just to maintain a flawless
record. Exactly. The pursuit of the flawless
travel record is a massive misallocation of resources.
The flaw of missing a flight once a decade is
the necessary, acceptable byproduct of living
an optimized, efficient life where you don't
waste your time. That completely flips the script
on how we view preparation. The goal isn't to
avoid failure at all costs. The goal is to price
the failure correctly. Beautifully said. I think
a lot of us need to audit our own lives and figure
out where we are currently sitting at the gate
for four hours. We absolutely do. We naturally
fear the acute, highly visible pain of a failure,
like missing the flight or publishing a typo,
much more than we notice the chronic, invisible
drain of the wasted time it took to prevent it.
And this concept of over -optimization bleeding
into wasted time is a foundational rule in computer
science, too. Oh, definitely. Donald Knuth, a
giant in the field of computer programming, has
a famous statement. He said, In the programming
world, premature optimization means that developers
try and make their code run perfectly fast. or
use perfectly minimal memory before they even
know if the basic program actually works to solve
the problem in hand. So they're fixing problems
that might not even exist yet. Exactly. Imagine
spending weeks optimizing a sorting algorithm
for a database that only has 10 items in it.
It's a massive waste of time, it makes the code
overly complex, and it distracts from the actual
goal, which is building a functional piece of
software. You're polishing the diamond before
you even dug it out of the mine. Yes. And while
Truth was talking about code, this applies to
everything. Premature optimization is the writer
who spends three weeks picking the perfect font
and formatting their title page before they've
written chapter one. Guilty. It is the person
who spends five days organizing a flawless digital
workspace with color -coded tags to manage a
project they haven't actually started yet. Or
buying the absolute highest end, perfectly engineered
running shoes before you've even proven to yourself
you can jog around the block consistently. The
optimization becomes a distraction from the execution.
We use the preparation to avoid doing the actual
work. And in the business world, this phenomenon
actually have a name. In marketing and product
development, there is a recognized concept called
quality creep, and it is viewed as actively counterproductive
to success. Quality creep is a very specific,
very dangerous trap. It happens when a team keeps
adding features. or endlessly polishing a marketing
campaign well beyond what the consumer actually
needs or cares about. So you're just sinking
money and labor into it. Right. You are sinking
hours into pushing a product from 95 % good to
99 % good. But the reality of the market is that
the customer was already entirely satisfied and
ready to buy at 90%. Wow. That extra 9 % of quality
you chased is counterproductive because the return
on investment for that effort is effectively
zero. You've marred what was well by trying to
mend it for no practical reason. So what does
this all mean? We have covered a massive amount
of ground today. We really have. And the through
line connecting all of these distinct ideas is
incredibly clear across centuries, from the ancient
wisdom of Aristotle counseling against extremes
to Shakespeare warning us about marring what
is well. Right up to modern economists, military
strategists, and computer programmers. The consensus
is undeniable. Flawlessness is a trap. Good enough
isn't a compromise, and it isn't a failure. It
is very often the smartest, most strategic goal
you can aim for. It is the optimal strategy for
navigating a reality where you have finite time
and finite resources. You simply cannot afford
to be perfect. So, to you listening right now.
When you are absorbing new information, when
you are doing research for that big presentation,
or when you are just trying to finally finish
a task that has been lingering on your desk for
weeks, I want you to actively embrace the flawed
diamond. Stop trying to smooth it into a useless
pebble. Give them the third best to go on with.
Respect your own time enough to risk occasionally
missing a metaphorical plane. Your energy is
entirely too precious to spend sitting at the
departure gate of perfection. This raises an
important question, though, and it's something
I want to leave you to ponder as you step back
into your day. Okay, let's hear it. We've established
that perfection kills the good, and that striving
to mend often mars what is well. But if the pursuit
of perfection actively destroys the good, How
do we identify that exact invisible tipping point?
That is the big question. Is there a measurable
moment in our work, a specific minute of editing
or tweaking a design? We're researching one more
article where our genuine desire to improve secretly
transforms into the destruction of our own progress.
Finding that invisible line where the return
on investment drops to zero. Exactly. Next time
you find yourself endlessly revising a project,
stop and ask yourself, have I already crossed
the line from polishing the diamond to crushing
it into a pebble? That is such a brilliant, challenging
thought to leave off on. Are you polishing the
diamond or are you crushing it? Thank you so
much for joining us on this deep dive. It's been
a pleasure. We love unpacking these concepts
and figuring out how to apply them alongside
you. Now get out there, stop over -optimizing,
and boldly make some perfectly good, gloriously
imperfect things. We will catch you next time.