If you're currently prepping for a really high
stakes meeting right now. Or maybe just agonizing
over the phrasing of a single relatively simple
email. Yes, exactly. If you are doing that or
endlessly tweaking a project that was honestly
ready to go like three days ago, you are likely
caught in the ultimate productivity trap. It
is so common. You just can't seem to stop moving
the margins around. Right. And it's a universal
experience. Its name is perfectionism. And it's
an incredibly easy trap to fall into, largely
because, well, aiming for perfection masquerades
as a virtue. Yeah, it really does. We're conditioned
from a very young age to do our absolute best.
But there is a massive difference between doing
your best and demanding absolute perfection.
Which brings us directly to the topic of today's
deep dive. We are looking at a single, heavily
layered Wikipedia article focused entirely on
one world -changing aphorism. Perfect is the
enemy of good. That's the one. And the mission
of today's deep dive is to explore the history
of that phrase, to look at its surprising variations
across different cultures, and most importantly,
To examine the real world applications. Right.
Why chasing absolute perfection so often stops
us from actually doing good, valuable work. And
as we navigate this, I really want you, the listener,
to keep your own current projects in mind. Think
about where you might be holding yourself back
by, you know, holding out for a flawless outcome.
So let's establish the core definition provided
by our source. It essentially states that the
insistence on perfection prevents the implementation
of good improvements. Because achieving absolute
perfection might actually be impossible. Exactly.
And the pursuit of that impossible standard shouldn't
prevent you from completing work that is imperfect,
yet still highly valuable. Okay, let's unpack
this by looking at the origins of this phrase
in the English -speaking world. Oh, wait. I usually
say that. Oh, my apologies. Go ahead. Okay, let's
unpack this. By looking at the origins, if you
ask someone with a literature background where
this comes from, it's commonly attributed to
the French philosopher Voltaire. Right, from
his 1770 work, Christiansen sur l 'Encyclopédie.
But the fun fact here is that Voltaire wasn't
actually the originator of the thought. He was
quoting a proverb. He was borrowing established
wisdom. Yeah, an Italian proverb. He actually
wrote, Il meglio è l 'inimico del bene. The literal
translation being, the best is the enemy of the
good. And he liked that concept so much. He loved
it. He used it to open his moral poem, La Bigole,
referencing a wise Italian who says the best
is the enemy of the good. Well, Voltaire gets
the widespread credit for popularizing it. What's
interesting is another major French philosopher,
Montesquieu, beat him to the punch by several
decades. Oh, really? What was his version? Around
1726, in his Pensées, Montesquieu wrote something
a bit sharper. He said, the best is the mortal
enemy of the good. The mortal enemy. Wow, that
really changes the vibe of it. It does. What's
fascinating here is the deliberate escalation
by using the word mortal. Yeah, it makes it sound
like a life or death struggle. Exactly. He recognized
philosophically that holding out for the best
doesn't just delay the good. It actively destroys
its viability. Right. Because if you refuse to
accept anything less than the absolute best,
the good never even survives. It's a fatal threat
to actually shipping any real world work. Which
perfectly illustrates how perfectionism is basically
self -sabotage. It's an assassin waiting to kill
your perfectly functional work before anyone
else can see it. And that actually brings us
to the antecedents section of the source. This
isn't just some 18th century European idea. Right.
It goes all the way back to antiquity. Yes. Think
about Aristotle's golden mean. The classical
philosophers counseled against extremism in all
forms. So perfectionism is a form of extremism.
Precisely. It's an extreme, unyielding demand
placed on a system or on yourself. By demanding
perfection, you abandon that healthy, virtuous
middle ground of just being good. That makes
a lot of sense. And I love how this idea shows
up in classic English literature, too. Shakespeare
actually tackled this exact friction. Oh, of
course he did. Yeah, in King Lear, written in
1606, the Duke of Albany has this brilliant warning.
He says, striving to better, oft we mar what's
well. Striving to better, oft we mar what's well.
We ruin what's already working. Yes, and he hits
our identical theme again in Sonnet 103. He writes,
Were it not sinful then, striving to mend, to
mar the subject that before was well. Framing
it as a sin is so potent. And if you translate
that striving to mend into a modern situation
like, think about tweaking a presentation slide.
Well, we've all been there. Right. It's finished.
It looks professional. It is well. But then you
get that urge to strive to mend. You start adding
unnecessary animations. Changing the fonts, importing
massive high -res files, and then boom, software
crashes. The file corrupts. And you missed the
deadline. Exactly. In your striving to better,
you literally marred what was well. It's the
exact same human impulse Shakespeare observed,
just playing out on a laptop instead of parchment.
Here's where it gets really interesting, because
the source pivots to show how this takes on different
cultural variations. I love this part. There's
this beautiful imagery from an 1893 dictionary
of quotations. It highlights a Chinese proverb
that says, better a diamond with a flaw than
a pebble without one. Visually, that perfectly
captures the concept. It really does. A diamond
has immense intrinsic worth, right? Even with
a flaw, it retains value. But a pebble. Even
a completely flawless, perfectly smooth pebble.
Has almost zero intrinsic value. So the message
is you want to produce flawed diamonds. Your
work has inherent value, even if it contains
a typo or a minor bug in the launch. And that
pragmatic approach isn't just for poetry. It's
a rule of survival in modern fields. Like military
and tech history, right? Yes, specifically Robert
Watson. He was instrumental in developing early
warning radar during World War II. Right. And
he had this philosophy he called the cult of
the imperfect. Which sounds wild for a military
engineer. It does. But his reasoning was purely
pragmatic. He said, give them the third best
to go on with. The second best comes too late.
The best never comes. The best never comes. Wow.
Think about the stakes during the Battle of Britain.
Speed beat theoretical perfection every time.
If you wait to deploy the perfect radar, your
country might be decimated while you're still
running diagnostics. So the third best system,
even with limited range, is infinitely more valuable
because it actually exists. Exactly. He chose
the flawed diamond and it literally changed the
course of history. Which completely validates
the idea of perfection as a mortal enemy. Waiting
for the best there meant death. Now let's look
at economics. George Stigler had this hilarious
and counterintuitive assertion about time management.
Ah, the airport quote. Yes. He said if you never
miss a plane, you're spending too much time at
the airport. I love that one so much. Because
to guarantee you never, ever miss a flight. Accounting
for traffic, flat tires, long security lines.
You'd have to arrive like four hours early every
single time. Right. The hidden cost of a 100
% success rate is the massive surplus of your
own time just wasted sitting in a terminal. So
to optimize your life, you have to accept the
risk of occasionally missing a plane. Because
it reclaims hundreds of hours of your life. The
source also brings this into computer science.
Donald Knuth has this famous rule for programming
optimization. Premature optimization is the root
of all evil. Strong words. Very. But it happens
when a programmer spends weeks making a tiny
piece of code run incredibly fast. Before the
whole program is even finished. Right. They optimize
for a scenario that might not even matter. the
product gets delayed budget is blown all because
they obsessed over a micro detail which flows
right into the marketing concept of quality creep
oh quality creep is dangerous it's when a team
just keeps adding tiny incremental improvements
pushing back the launch date until the product
isn't even viable anymore if we connect this
to the bigger picture look at the pattern here
we've got 18th century french philosophy World
War II radar, modern economics, computer coding,
marketing. Totally different fields. But they've
all independently discovered the exact same truth.
Conquering the illusion of perfection is required
to deliver anything of actual value. So what
does this all mean? How do we mentally categorize
these traps so we can avoid them? The see also
section of the source gives us a great web of
these related concepts. Let's do a rapid fire
round of these to give you listening some mental
models to take away, starting with project management,
gold plating. Gold plating is essentially adding
unnecessary features to something that's already
finished. Like taking a functional building and
needlessly painting it in gold. Exactly. It has
no functional value, just consumes resources.
And the counter to that is from politics and
business, Burt Lance's famous quote, if it ain't
broke, don't fix it. The ultimate pragmatic rule.
Next up, design and engineering. The KISS principle.
You keep it simple, stupid. Complexity is often
just a symptom of trying to be too perfect. Every
moving part you add is just another potential
point of failure. Then there's philosophy and
logic. The Nirvana fallacy. This one is insidious.
It's when we reject an actual realistic solution
simply because we're comparing it to an impossible
perfect utopia. Like voting down a plan that
reduces traffic by 40 % just because it doesn't
solve traffic completely. Right. You reject a
good improvement because it's not magic. Which
brings us to satisficing. A blend of satisfy
and suffice. It's a strategy where you stop searching
for solutions once you hit an acceptability threshold.
You don't optimize for the maximum. You optimize
for the requirement. And what about aesthetics,
Wabi Sabi? The Japanese concept of finding beauty
in imperfection and impermanence. It embraces
the asymmetry. Embracing the flawed diamond?
And lastly, from software. Worse is better. The
idea that a slightly worse, less elegant system
will win in the market because it actually ships.
Because it gets into users' hands years before
the perfect system is even out of beta testing.
This raises an important question for you, the
listener. Which of these traps do you fall into
the most? Yeah, you gold play your projects.
Are you a victim of the nirvana fallacy? It takes
real self -awareness to notice when you've crossed
the line from doing good work to just performing
perfectionism. It really does. So to wrap up
this deep dive, the central takeaway here is
that completing imperfect, flawed, but valuable
work is always superior to dreaming about flawless
work that never sees the light of day. It absolutely
is. So look at whatever project you are holding
back on right now. The email draft, the code,
the creative piece. I want you to embrace your
flawed diamond. Hit send. Publish it. Finish
it. Let it exist. And before we go, I want to
leave you with a thought. building on that Nirvana
fallacy. If absolute perfection is genuinely
impossible, Is perfectionism actually just a
socially acceptable disguise for our fear of
being judged? Oh, wow. Think about it. If we
claim we're just waiting for it to be perfect,
it gives us a permanent excuse to never put our
work out into the real world where it might be
criticized. That is a very provocative thought
to end on. Perfectionism as a shield. I know
I'm going to be thinking about that for my own
projects. We all should. Thank you so much for
joining us on this deep dive. Keep learning,
and most importantly, keep shipping your work.
Take care, everyone.