August 19, 2020
August 19, 2020#
My wife recently created two aphorisms for her life that I think are remarkably profound:
Good is bad. (Do best.)
Perfect is bad. (Done is best.)
Very relevant. There are an incredible number of good opportunities out in the world. So many in fact, that the real dilemma for many becomes not choosing between a good opportunity or a bad opportunity, but rather minimizing opportunity cost. In other words, minimizing the lost potential which occurs when you put your efforts into a suboptimal direction.
It’s a common problem, perhaps even universal. Not surprisingly, this has been studied and expounded on by many successful people in the past. There’s a classic speech in my church, Good, Better, Best, where former university president and jurist Dallin Oaks discusses this challenge of limiting focus to the best activities. In his words,
We should begin by recognizing the reality that just because something is good is not a sufficient reason for doing it. The number of good things we can do far exceeds the time available to accomplish them. Some things are better than good, and these are the things that should command priority attention in our lives.
Steve Jobs has a classic quote on this issue as well:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. (source)
James Clear, who authors one of my favorite blogs, has a fantastic article on why saying no is the ultimate productivity hack. It’s precisely to address this issue of good versus best. To accept only the best, you must say no to all other activites which are simply good.
I unfortunately don’t have time to expound on the second aphorism tonight, but I will do so in a future post.