How Good is Good Enough?
In our personal and professional lives we inevitably tackle and grind out projects. Writing this edition of the Friday Briefing, for instance, is a project. It has a deadline, a slot to fill, a purpose, and the germ of an idea at the heart of it. It is, at one and the same time, a chore and a labour of love.
Whether it’s a crown to fit on a patient’s upper right second molar, a non-disclosure agreement, or the mechanical drawings for a museum refit, we all have projects to fulfil for the benefit of patients, clients, or patrons.
Everyone has an opinion as to how good is good enough, with most of the literature falling into the 80% or 90% camps. In other words, there is a point after which you get steeply declining returns on the extra effort you pour into a project. These are all variations of the 80/20 Pareto Principle.
One of the pieces missing in most discussions is whether you should be doing the project in the first place. If, for instance, Michael Jordan and I were shooting a few hoops, no matter how competitive my nature (and it is), the sooner I get over the idea that I’m going to stay within five hundred points of Jordan, the less frustrated I’m going to be. There’s just stuff that you’re never going to be amazing at, and the less time you spend there, the better.
On the other hand, there’s lots of stuff where you just naturally excel. You can do it in your sleep, and if you’re not being ridiculously modest, you know that you do it better than almost anyone else you know. And when we’re working on projects that are very much “in our wheelhouse”, I believe a different standard applies.
In all projects there are baselines of adequacy. A dentist doesn’t want that crown to fall off in six months, the lawyer doesn’t want to get sued because someone just drove a truck through his non-disclosure agreement, and the architect doesn’t want to show up on the national news as the guy behind a $50,000,000 re-do fiasco. These are the minimal reputational limits.
The true test for real professionals is pride. Not arrogant, inflated self-pride, but the quiet kind of pride that you take away from a job well done. Very well done. Very, very, well done. The kind of pride that assures you that decades later, when another practitioner sees an example of your work, she will smile and nod approvingly, and say, “Nice work! Very nice work!”
In my experience, this kind of pride in output is one of the simplest ways of knowing if you’re in the right line of work. If you’re practicing in a field where your output is normally a source of pride, joy, and satisfaction, then you’re probably where you’re meant to be. But if you’re in a place where you just can’t wait to get the last box of sausages out the door and go home, then even the 80% rule isn’t going to work all the time. You’re going to make mistakes and get sued, because your heart is not in it. (I don’t mean that last box, by the way…)
So, the question “How good is good enough?” tells us more about the practitioner than the project. And the personal question for each of us is not so much “How good is good enough?”, but “Why is this good enough?” Because if you are where you are meant to be, you will know the answer.