95% is good enough
Finding the balance between “good enough” and “perfect” is always difficult. I’ve realised that I often strive for perfectionism, even when it makes no sense.
Two days ago I was assembling a new web server for a website of a mathematical competition. A friend of mine came along asking if he could help. Suddenly, we put the machine together in ~45 minutes. It’d take me hours, if I were doing it all by myself.
I doubt that the friend had more experience with assembling computers than I had, he just didn’t feel the need for doing everything super-carefully.
This is my point. If it’s possible to achieve 95% of the perfect result in just a fraction of the time required for perfectness, I think it’s worth it.
Of course, this cannot be applied in every case - finding the balance is always difficult. 95%, however, seem to be “good enough” in most cases.
Just about everyone has a place to live, a phone, a television, a car, and some source of income. We have clothes to wear and food to eat. With our basic needs taken care of, we drift into a dangerous place called “the comfort zone.” We lack either the sense of overwhelming desperation or the incredible force of inspiration to drive us into the marketplace. We might often wish for more. We might frequently want more.
But we have neither a burning need nor a burning desire to do what it takes to have more. The most dangerous aspect of the comfort zone is that it seems to affect our hearing. The more comfortable we are, the more oblivious we become to the sound of the ticking clock. Because there always seems to be so much time ahead of us, we unwittingly squander the present moment. We use it for entertaining ourselves rather than for preparing ourselves.
