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Perfectionism – one of the biggest productivity killers in the eng industry
(newsletter.eng-leadership.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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It's easier to see the issue if you flip the graph, and add random points to it:
Consider A = a half-baked attempt, B = a decent effort, and C = striving for perfection.
The quality of whatever you're doing improves a fair bit when you go from A to B. But when you go from B to C, you're spending a lot of time and yet quality barely goes up. That time could be better spent elsewhere.
It's all about diminishing returns. And based on the existence of adages like Voltaire's "perfect is enemy of good", or my grandma's "the devil fiddled so much with his son's eye that pierced it", it seems to me that people know it on an intuitive level, and that it isn't just about businesses and production and programming. It's simply that people fail to recognise when it's good enough.
I appreciate your comment, also wth is your grandma's quote 😂.That's a new one for me.
This quote has a small associated story. I don't know if my grandma made it up or pulled it from the local "collective wisdom", but it goes like this:
The devil just had a baby boy, and the devil's son had beautiful eyes. So the devil couldn't stop messing with it, while saying "look at my son's beautiful eyes!" And he would fiddle around with his son's eyes so much that, one day, he accidentally pierced one of them.
She often told us this story or the quote when we were messing too much with something already good enough. Sometimes because we might break it, sometimes simply because of the wasted time.
She also had other funny quotes, like:
Those are fantastic 😄, thanks for sharing!