…become the enemy of good.
A lot of what I do involve working with text, either on my own or with others. Moving a comma here, changing a word there, and completely changing the sentence structure over in this other section. At some point, you have to go from “doing” to “done”. Whether that’s because you’re up against a deadline, or if it’s just because you need to be done with it to move on to other work, you need to get it done.
The truth of the matter is that perfection is an ever-moving target. Never truly in sight, always just out of reach. You keep thinking “now, if I could just do one more change, I’ll be there. And then you go through it all again, and damn if you don’t find more things to change. All of this to say that chasing perfection is an exercise in diminishing returns.
At the end of the day, perfection might be a laudable goal, but good is more often than not the better option. Sometimes you can’t even get there, and have to settle for “good enough” or even “bad“. And that’s OK.
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