How good is good enough?

I was chatting with my beloved Penny tonight, and we started talking about perfectionism. We have all fallen victim to trying to make “it” too perfect. And then we chastise ourselves for not achieving that perfection.

I realized, when my late husband showed me a chart, that “perfect” is a physical impossibility,

OK, visual a chart with two axes. Almost every large manufacturer does this chart. The horizontal axis is Cost, the vertical axis is Quality. Then if you chart the cost (and cost can be time, or money, or resources) to reach a certain quality you discover something very interesting.

The chart will invariably show that the cost for the last 40% of quality costs as much as the first 60%.

The last 15% costs as much as the first 85%.

The last 5% costs as much as the first 95%.

The last 1 % costs as much as the first 99%!

That is why there is no such thing as “Perfect”. “Perfect” is prohibitively expensive in time, money, and effort.

So when looking at their market, the manufacturer has to decide what price point they want to compete at, then find that point on their cost/quality curve. That is how “perfect” they can make their product.

How does that affect you?

First, it should show you that you cannot possibly be “Perfect”. Because it would take the rest of your life to reach “perfection” on every single goal.

Second, since it is an impossibility to be perfect, and you must accept that, then you can DECIDE just how close to “perfect” you really want to be? How much time do you really want to spend reaching the prohibitively expensive “perfection” that you have been driving yourself toward? What other things could you be doing with your time, instead of trying to reach perfection?

For example, the companies that own fiber optic communications cables that now encircle our globe, shoot for 99.9999% “up time”. In other words they strive to be able to transmit light down their miles of fiber optic cable 99.9999% of the time. Now that does not include the other measures of quality that they strive to achieve, but only the actual frequency of “up time”.

There are about 31.5 million seconds in a year. To reach their goal of 99.9999% up time, their ability to transmit data can only be out of commission for 31.45 seconds per year! About half a minute. Not much time!

In order to reach their goal, they have developed the ability to switch between individual strands of the cable, so unless it is actually cut in two, and all of the individual strands within the cable are therefore broken, it is not as difficult as you might think.

But in order to insure that they do not “go down” completely, they put in “rings” of cables. In other they put in one cable down one route, say a highway. Then they lay another cable down a different highway. That way, the odds of both cables being cut at the same time are extremely remote! And the switching gear that changes your phone call from one cable to another is extremely fast. That change takes place in nanoseconds (billionths of a second).

So what I learned, long ago when my late husband and I were first dating, is

1) Perfection is impossible
2) Forgive yourself for not being perfect, but instead being simply the fallible human God made you to be
3) Choose just how much you want to be "perfect"on a project-by-project basis, considering time, other priorities, and costs
4) And then live life in a far more productive environment that choose rationally how "perfect" to be.