Good Enough

Douglas Edwards, one of the original employees of Google, wrote about the Google Philosophy in his memoir, “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

“Good enough is good enough was the standard for engineering. Those five words encapsulate a philosophy for solving problems, cutting through complexity, and embracing failure.

“If you have a [to-do] list that’s longer than you can deal with, you have to prioritize. If you give a project a quick improvement that gets you 80 percent of the way to solving the problem, you haven’t solved it, but it drops below the line, versus a project you haven’t worked on at all. Once a problem falls below the line, you should work on something else.

“At some point, all the problems that are really important are solved, and that is the definition of success.”

When I first read that, I was thrilled because that’s always been the secret of my efficiency, how I get so much done in so little time. But when I rhapsodize about my “good enough is good enough” philosophy at job interviews, I can see potential employers literally pull away, repulsed! It’s never what they want to hear. They want to hear the lie, that you are somehow so effective, you can juggle a hundred assignments and bring them all in under budget and on deadline with 100 percent perfection. Don’t they know that Google built a multi-billion dollar empire on “good enough is good enough”?

So they hire the one who tells them what they want to hear, and at every staff meeting from then on, what they hear is the project is progressing, it’s in the works, it’s very close to being done, it’s coming together, it’s moving forward. The fruit is low-hanging. And yet it never gets finished. At the next staff meeting, it’s the same status report. I’ve been in meetings where projects have been in limbo for years. Eventually, the project is just forgotten, replaced by more projects that never get finished.

Sadly, although I’m a “get it done” person, I’m married to a “it’s not worth doing unless it’s done right” person who can complicate and delay even the simplest job by adding what to me are many unnecessary steps. For example, I want the two broken rails on the deck fixed, and he bought enough lumber to replace all the rails. That was three years ago. Let’s stop a moment and reflect on that. Three. Years. Ago.

“Can’t you just find the time to replace the two rails that are broken and do the rest later?” I beg. All I want for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, my birthday, our anniversary every year is to have those two rails fixed. But…no.

“It won’t look right with two new ones and the rest of them old. I want to do it right, replace all of them all at once. Once I get the tools out, I might as well do them all.” But there’s never time in his schedule for a job of that magnitude. That would take all day, while replacing two rails would take an hour or two.

It’s impossible for him to do a halfway job, even though what I want – the broken rails replaced – would be good enough for me. Good enough is good enough. Don’t believe me? Google it.