Saturday, April 14, 2007

"Perfect" is the enemy of "good enough", and

I hope that you already know that. Perfectionism is a disease. It stops progress and drives us crazy. Perfect is unreachable.

But a while back I had a strange dream, and when I awoke I realized something else: "Good enough" is the enemy of "At all"!

Now I'm not suggesting that quality doesn't matter -- sometimes "good enough" or even "nearly perfect" is very important (brain surgery comes to mind). But more often, "good enough" isn't actually necessary and gets in our way. "Good enough" stops us from ever getting started in the first place.

Forget about your lack of talent, skills, knowledge, time, resources, or whatever else you need to be "good enough". Start an inane blog, take bad photographs, upload boring videos to YouTube, write bad software, create useless products, play bad music, and make ugly art. Forget "good enough", and then simply indulge in the joy of creation.

What did I experience in my dream? Passive consumption is the boring old form of entertainment. Joyous creation is the future of entertainment!

And who knows, maybe after we break through the static friction of quality, we'll discover that some of our work really is good enough, or maybe even great. But remember, although quality is nice, it's not the point.

The self-styled curmudgeons will continue to complain about all this senseless creation, but don't mind them -- they are simply flinging feces through the bars of their monkey cages. They are annoying but irrelevant -- they are not the ones who create the future.

I like xkcd.

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