Perfection Sought – When Good Enough is Enough

Perfection Sought

For the longest time I used our old grocery bags to line our kitchen under-the-counter garbage can. This was efficient for several reasons. Long before recycling came into vogue, it allowed useful dispense of our growing collection of grocery bags. Why not make them do something useful on their 1 last trip to the landfill?. It also reduced buying & paying for garbage bags designed just for this purpose.

Today, I was using 1 of those same grocery bags to dispense with the cat litter. Just when I thought I was done, I lift the bag after tying it and noticed a small pile of litter on the floor. Observing I noticed several small pesky holes, no bigger than a penny, at the seams of the bag underside. Not surprised, I confirmed, “Well dummy, these bags were not designed for litter disposal !”. Those holes are acceptable in this product because being used properly, to carry your grocery purchases, these holes were ok and even helped as it allows air to circulate amongst your produce.

I concluded, Well, its good enough. In manufacturing those bags, the several penny-sized holes are acceptable. No one will even return massive rolls or pallets of these bags, because of these defects. My fault for using them for a parallel application which it was not designed for.

Highly applicable in most of our parallel day-to-day tasks, many times, we have to conclude, Good Enough and ship the product. If we don’t we start to overthink & overedit to where it becomes counter productive. We have to recognize when the law of diminishing returns has arrived. There even have been times when I never did ship, as my counter-intuition talked me out of something and convinced me how bad the idea was. (Maybe it really wasn’t?)

Throughout our journeys, we no doubt have heard this sentiment paraphrased in various adages. My dad, in concluding some of his many projects would say, in translation,  Good enough for Me. In a joint project with my neighbhor in building a fence, he would say, We’re not building swiss watches here!.

Perfectionism is an ideology. I don’t really know where it belongs.

Like the article above ……. ooopppssss …… Time to Ship!