Good Enough

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

-Andy Grove

As one who likes to build and optimize, I love getting things perfect. It’s often impossible to be perfect. Infrastructure lock-in and incentives lead to good enough winning.

QWERTY keyboards aren’t the best keyboard configuration. Colemak and Dvorak are both better for the most common letters and punctuation we use. However, the fastest typists in the world all use QWERTY. This is because of the infrastructure lock-in of QWERTY. Every keyboard is QWERTY. When someone realized that there was a more effective layout, there were already millions of typewriters. It didn’t make sense to switch. QWERTY was and still is good enough.

Many life philosophies and popular frameworks are wrong. “Follow your passion” is bad advice. But it doesn’t matter. It’s good enough to get people to go after what gives them energy. Frameworks like “follow your passion” are good enough to get passed down generation after generation. 

This is called a minimum viable product in the tech world. When something is viable enough to work and take off, then it takes off. 

The structure of public education is stupid. Memorizing useless information as a status signal is a waste of time. But school grades as a whole are a decent filter to judge people. Grades aren’t perfect. Many, including myself, felt school was child prison. Even with incompetent teachers and edge cases breaking, school accurately segmenting ~80% of society is good enough.

Our public education system is only now becoming so broken that people are opting out. Of the over 300,000 public school teachers in California, only 20 were fired for performance issues over the last 20 years. No company is that good at hiring, and the CA school system is no exception. But even with a plethora of incompetents, the public school system in CA has been barely good enough.

What you’re good enough at matters. In An Economist Gets Lunch, Tyler Cowen talks about the history of prohibition. Speakeasies that served the best food were shut down by the speakeasies with the best connections to local law enforcement. Understanding incentives and aligning the powers that be can be the difference between life or death.

Healthy food just needs to be healthy enough. Our calendar and way we tell time is awful and yet good enough. Nonprofits that fill a role are good enough. Maybe they could be more optimized, but if they fill a role supporting a feel good cause, they’re good enough. Institutions slowly decay over time until they’re no longer good enough. They’re victims of their inertia. A lot has to go wrong for people realize an institution is no longer good enough. This is why there’s such a massive discrepancy between what is done vs what can be done.

When going from zero to one, get to good enough as fast as possible. But once one achieves good enough, innovation needs to continue. Preferably becoming good enough in several other categories and capturing territory. Then, put processes in place to make sure you’re pushing for more than good enough. Good enough is a stepping stone, not a destination. There’s always somewhere higher to climb.