Good Enough

I was working with a colleague on the About section of her LinkedIn profile and we got it to a level where we both agreed that it looked good. 30 minutes later, when I looked at her profile, I saw it wasn’t updated. When I asked her about it, she said that it wasn’t perfect yet and she needed more time to think about it.  

I was recently leading a virtual conference, where we asked the speakers to pre-record their talks. The only part of the conference that wasn’t virtual was the speakers/organizers dinner, which is a chilled out environment where we all get to meet, hang out and eat good food. The day of the dinner I got a message from one of the speakers that she wouldn’t be able to make it because she recorded her talk a few times and still wasn’t happy with it. 

There is a well-known expression, “Perfect is the enemy of good enough.” Everything can be improved. Everything. However, that doesn’t mean that everything should be improved, or that you should wait until something is perfect before declaring it ready.

The question that needs to be answered is - what is “good enough”? How do you know if what you’ve done meets the threshold or if it actually does need a few more hours/months/years of work before it is ready for release? 

There is no single answer to this question, because it completely depends on what you are trying to accomplish and what is required in order to get there. The first thing that you need to do is determine or establish the minimum threshold for acceptance. There are two types of acceptance criteria, quantity and quality. 

Quantity criteria are limits that you should put in additional effort in order to meet. For example, number of words in an article that you plan to publish, number of minutes in a speech you are giving, number of people that need to approve a proposal before a final submission. Not all of the quantity criteria are hard limits, meaning instant rejection if you are over/under a bit, but it is generally worth the effort of ensuring that you are within the stated boundaries. For example, if you are writing an article that asks for between 500-1000 words, and you have 490 words or 1100 words, you should try to edit it so that it meets the given requirements, but that doesn’t mean that it will be rejected if you don’t.. 

Quality criteria are much more difficult to judge and a lot of people have trouble with this. Before submitting anything that has personal/professional ramifications, you should ask one or two people for a review. People who you trust to give constructive feedback, but not to judge too harshly. Don’t go to a perfectionist. Another major consideration is the ramifications of not being good enough. If it is like a LinkedIn profile, which you can continue to improve after submitting it, it is worth submitting it after you get initial feedback and then ask a few more friends to look at it. You can set yourself a monthly time budget for continuous working on your profile so you can fine tune the details based on new ideas you have, other profiles that you’ve seen and feedback that you received. This is generally true for professional proposals and ideas that you want to present. They don’t have to be perfect on submission, because it is understood that you will continue to work on it and maybe even lead a task force to finalize the idea. So the sooner it gets in, the better. 

However, if it is something that can only be submitted once, such as a resume for a job that you really want, the threshold of “good enough” is a bit higher. In that case, you want to give yourself a deadline. Make sure that it is good enough, get feedback and ponder a bit. You do need to remember that it needs to be submitted sooner than later. After getting to a level that you think is mostly good, if not perfect, it is probably acceptable to sit on it for an additional hour or overnight, ask another colleague to take a look or say a heartfelt prayer. After this, it is good enough and any additional time you spend on it will generally be to your detriment.