Perfection and good enough [Ep32]

ShowNotes

Welcome to Quan2m! the Podcast every STEM student should be listening to. Covering everything from what’s going on in the world of science, interviewing people with STEM majors and what they have gone on to do. To talking about finance, careers and business.

In the last we talked about the darwinian demon

In this episode I want to follow onto that about talking about perfection as a whole.

• There is no perfect.
• Things can always be better
• My life is pretty fucking great IMO, but is it perfect. Ofcourse not

The chase for perfection is a fools game and has always hurt me

Good enough is what I always aim for.

• Now it’s important to keep one thing in mind though.
• I put my standards very high on things that matter. So good enough is still very fucking good
• But perfect is the threshold of massively diminishing returns that will be unreachable

Example

Job I was applying for

• Got a bunch of stuff to go through and write an executive summary
• An executive summary is the definition of good enough
• Distill just the most important info so someone has a “good enough” understanding
• Now in this case I really didn’t have enough time to give it to make it really good. The assignment said it should take about an hour. I had about 2 hours of time for it. And to make it really good I probably would have needed 4 to 5 cause I wanted to make my own graphics and diagrams

Good enough is how you can keep up with the hectic marathon that is a company, but it’s important to have a good enough that is good enough.

There are things where my standards are low. Let’s take marketing. With these episodes I strongly believe that the volume and gradual improvement I get from doing them is more important that making them higher quality by spending hours editing them and making sure they sound perfect.

Now honestly for this podcast in the quality it is in right now I don’t think my good enough is good enough. I decided its fine cause I don’t have to spend on it, but it should be better.

Let’s take another example. For my company we were working on the website. Due to some architecture and management mistakes it ended up having massive delays. Now we needed it up so there were things we just hardcoded, etc. and called it good enough to release

There is a good enough that is temporary and good enough that is long term

Also there is good enough for you and that might not always be good enough for someone else. You need to think about your standards and understand them so when you think something is good enough and someone else disagrees you feel comfortable ignoring them

Thank you for listening. If you are listening on Apple podcasts please consider leaving a rating. If you have any feedback you can reach out to me on twitter at @Qun2m2 or through anchor. Both are in the description. Thank you very much and I hope you have a lovely day! Bye!