Perfect is the Enemy of Good
Perfect is the enemy of good. This aphorism is a concise way of saying that focusing on perfection can result in failing to even bring something good forth. If you are developing a new product, working towards perfection can increase your development time allowing competitors to bring a good product to market first and capture market share. In fact, if you wait too long to bring a product to market or focus too heavily on perfection, inferior competitors may beat you in the market completely.
The more time and energy you put into a creation the more you can add to it, the more you can polish it. You can also overwork it. For example if you are kneading bread there is a limit to how much you can knead it before you ruin it. At some point you have to stop and allow the bread to rest and rise while there is still air in the door. The same is true for any other type of creation. At some point you must stop working towards perfection and release your creation to the world. You should not continue to fight to improve a product, article, video, etc. by a percent or two, especially since your audience or customers are unlikely to notice the difference or even care at all.
Fighting for perfection gives everyone you’re competing against the time they need to identify the same opportunity in the market and produce a similar product faster. It may not be a better product and in fact, is sometimes an inferior product, but because it was released first will get the news cycle, get the first looks by the consumers and perhaps gain an insurmountable lead. By the time you’re done striving for perfection you are so far behind that folks see your product as a copycat product and don’t even consider it as a good alternative.
Examples of Inferior Products That Won in the Marketplace
In 1984 Apple released the Macintosh computer and in 1985 Microsoft released Windows. There is no doubt that the Macintosh operating system was better than Windows. It ran more smoothly, had more built in features and the application windows could overlap each other. It was also expensive and required specific hardware that could only be provided by Apple. Microsoft’s Windows was slower, had less features and required powerful hardware to run smoothly. Windows, however, was pitched successfully to businesses as able to run on different hardware and be a good overall business solution. Even though Windows was inferior to Mac OS it won the OS war in the 80’s and 90’s through better marketing.
Another example is where the iPhone triumphed over technically superior competitors. The original iPhone was released in 2007. When Apple released the iPhone it was missing 3G data connectivity, you couldn’t install third party apps, the camera was terrible and even if you took a picture there was no picture messaging available. The iPhone, however, took the market by storm. While the competition laughed at Apple during interviews, calling the iPhone not a very good business machine, customers stood in lines that wrapped around city blocks for a chance to buy the device. Apple had done a phenomenal job marketing the device. Customers wanted to be part of this exciting revolution.
Over the next several years, Apple would continually improve the iPhone. It now has the best camera on a phone, offers 5G connectivity, picture messaging, a great app store and many other improvements. If you compare iOS to their biggest competitor Android, then Android wins in sheer installs, but Apple’s iOS wins in industry profits. Today you can buy phones with nearly the same or in some cases better specifications, sometimes for less, yet those individual phones cannot outsell the iPhone. Apple was the first to market with what we now see as the standard phone format and they marketed it better than anyone else. It is possible that someone will come out with a better product that can topple the iPhone, perhaps even Apple themselves, but I wouldn’t count on it happening anytime soon.
Law of Diminishing Returns
The law of diminishing returns is a mathematical concept that states that increasing resources in a production process will see lower returns over time. For example, if you have a factory floor building cars and only have 1 person on the floor, increasing the staff by hiring 1 additional person will double your output. However, if you have 1,000 workers on the factory floor, adding 1 additional person will have a much smaller increase to production.
The same concept applies directly with other types of development and creation. For example if you are making a video on YouTube and spend 10 hours to make a very good video, you may spend another 10 hours to only increase the final quality by a very small percentage. In fact, while you are spending that time working towards perfection, several competitors may release videos that were good enough. By striving for perfection you let the market pass you by.
If you are in college and working toward your degree in business, you can spend all night, every night, studying to graduate with a 4.0 grade point average. The reality is that you can also have a C average in college and still graduate with a degree. Your C average degree is just as valuable as an A average degree. Employers do not look at your GPA, just that you graduated. (though nowadays many companies are no longer concerned with having a college degree). By spending all of your time focusing on a 4.0 GPA and graduating valedictorian, you missed opportunities to get real world experience with off campus jobs, work as an intern, join additional projects or do independent studies into related fields. You might actually lose in the job hunting process to students who had a 3.0 GPA.
When It Meets Its Purpose, Release It
You must develop the ability to see where you are getting your maximum return on investment and learn that that is the point to stop working and move on to the next step. Do not spend hours working on a sentence to get the perfect set of words. Instead, ask yourself if you’ve successfully conveyed your message and move on to the next part of your article.
I write 1 new article every day, Mon-Fri. If I strived for perfection I could never hope to achieve this level of output. If I was worried about every article being perfect, I would spend perhaps a week, 2 weeks or a month, putting every article together. Would the articles be superior? Perhaps they would be better formatted, include fancier writing or have more perfect grammar. Would they convey the point of the article any better? Probably not. Instead of striving for perfection, I simply write my article, do a spell check and grammar check. Do a quick search for a thumbnail image and post it.
Are my articles perfect? No, they are not. Are they good? That’s subjective, but I think so. In fact, if I go back and look at my earliest articles, it’s plainly clear that releasing 1 article every day has seen a gradual improvement in the quality of my articles overtime. My initial articles were very short, often lacked good examples, had spelling and grammatical errors and had much poorer thumbnails. As I practiced and iterated on my writing everyday it steadily improved.
Look at what you are trying to achieve. If you are developing a new widget to complete a task, ask yourself, does this widget achieve the task yet? If it does, it’s time to release it to market. You can add improvements to versions 2.0, 3.0 etc. Get it out now and let the market tell you how good your idea is. If you widget doesn’t achieve the task, keep working until it does and stop. Shift gears from development to production and marketing. If you are a new content creator making videos for YouTube, grab your iPhone film yourself in selfie mode and get your videos uploaded as soon as you’re confident you’ve gotten your point across. Will the videos be perfect? No. Will they get better over time absolutely. Don’t believe me? Look at the channels for MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips on YouTube and compare their first videos to their current videos. They are now every bit as good as a big budget Hollywood production but started filming with camcorders and point and shoot cameras.
Do not dwell on perfection. Do not spend countless hours improving something from 90% perfect to 91% perfect. The sad truth is that no one may even notice. You may spend double the time to produce a product that is better, but no one will even care. Instead produce that product that is good or even great now. Make the next version better. Do not lose your chance to seize opportunity by procrastinating the release under the pursuit of perfection.
I thought about writing a book for years, until I just stopped procrastinating and wrote it over the course of 2 months. In 2019 I released my book the Success System. Check it out! I had spent countless hours thinking through concepts, writing outlines, talking to others about the content. This was literal years of my time in working on the lead to actually writing it. At some point I just had to get on with it. So I did and It came out and you can buy it now. If I hadn’t stopped procrastinating and got down to writing, it would not be available today.
Have you ever struggled with working something toward perfection and never getting it released? Have you found yourself working long nights to produce work that is perfect, but was probably good enough hours earlier? I want to hear about it. Tell me below, contact me or meet me at my website LeaderLifeline.com!
Originally published at https://www.leaderlifeline.com on April 5, 2021.
