There are times when being a perfectionist is damaging. It's most of the time, actually. Very few things actually need to be perfect. But most of the time, “perfect” is inferior to “good enough.”

I covered an entrepreneurship event this week where the concept of perfection versus “good enough” was mentioned, but I had earlier seen the same idea. Actually, I read the concept years ago in an essay entitled “The Rise of `Worse is Better,'” by Richard Gabriel. The essay is all about designing software, about how in some cases it's better to sacrifice correctness and completeness for simplicity. The specifics of his argument are software-development-centric, but the philosophy-changing idea within the essay was thus: “better” isn't always “better.” The modern world is filled with examples of inferior technologies being widespread either because they were first to gain marketshare, or because the “cheap-and-dirty” solution had a greater payoff than the elegant solution. VHS won over BetaMax in being in people's homes, and the Intel 8086 won over Motorola 68000 in being in people's computers.

So the idea of “good enough” is nothing new; it's been floating around technology and business circles for years. But I wouldn't be writing about it here if it applied only to students living in VeloCity and people taking software engineering. No, there's a lesson in here for everybody, even the artsiest of university students.

First, being intimidated by perfection is stalling. It's easy to avoid starting that paper if you don't know exactly how the opening and closing will be, or haven't worked out every nuance of your argument. Just do something. It doesn't have to be perfect. So many things are iterative processes, like writing, or building a web service. The first draft isn't going to be perfect. Start with good enough.

Also, don't throw everything away just because you don't like some little detail. Your goal is completion, not perfection. If you throw out your work every time you're half way done, you'll never get anywhere. That's what happened with Duke Nukem Forever.

The philosophy applies to everything in the world, including this newspaper. I'll admit, mistakes make it to press from time to time. Last week, page 8 had a particularly epic typo. An error on page 3 taught us all the difference between buses (the thing you ride to school) and busses (to kiss). I'm ridiculously detail oriented and somewhat obsessive, so I would happily read every page several times, make sure every photo is properly levelled, and make sure every headline is exactly a pica away from its story. But if I did that, the newspaper wouldn't be improved — it'd be the worst newspaper ever, because you'd never get to actually read it. There's always one more thing to fix.

The problem isn't that perfection is bad. No, the problem is that perfection is really expensive. It's true I would rather have a perfect essay than an imperfect essay, but with real world finite constraints that's not the choice I have to make. It's more like a choice between getting okay marks in every class, or getting 100 per cent in one class and failing all the others. Or failing everything, because nothing actually got finished. Going through just this piece of writing and fixing obvious mistakes is fairly simple, but polishing this editorial to a mirror shine yields diminishing returns. I started a sentence with a “but” up there in the very first paragraph; technically that's bad form. Should I spend several minutes trying to rework that paragraph without the “but” while maintaining the same tone and inflection? Did you even notice the imperfection in the first place?

I'm not advocating laziness, or trying to excuse a lack of due diligence. I can't publish libel, engineers can't afford to build a plane with faulty wings, etc. There is a wide gulf of difference between “lazy” and recognizing when additional effort isn't warranted. Some details are important to get right, but simultaneously there are times when good enough is...good enough. Just get it done already.