The Done vs Perfect dilemma
Featured on UX design Medium, this article was first published on my weekly newsletter, Sound and Vision and
The problem is in the phrase itself.
The two parts are different (not opposite, just different) so it’s quite misleading to compare them. Done is a state. It’s when we achieve its pre-agreed definition. Perfect is an evaluation, an empyreal goal with high polysemy. If we put them in a Venn diagram, the intersection should be Utopia.
If you aim only for perfection then, the moment you’ll reach it, you’ll find yourself in front of a tsunami of new ideas and potential iterations that will make your work even better. You’ll constantly raise the bar, never be happy, and never release anything.
I enjoyed the following Beatles’ story on the subject, from a related article by Tom Peterson.
(…) most Beatles recordings (there are around 300) are simply done. Yet their combined effect was a fantastically creative body of work. In the early years, the group performed relentlessly and found its sound. And when they were in songwriting mode, Lennon and McCartney would set up a series of days. Paul would drive to John’s house on the scheduled day, “We always wrote a song a day, whatever happened we always wrote a song a day,” he said. “We never had a dry day.”
Voltaire wrote, “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Had the Beatles performed only their perfect work perfectly, we’d have never heard of them.
The worst of all is that you’ll never learn anything. You need to share findings, knowledge, and results with peers and the whole world if possible. So, you can find people with similar problems and hopefully answers. So, you have the chance of fixing the mistakes (those perfect mistakes) you don’t see, by letting your work go public to more than one person. That’s how we all get better.
““You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.””
I tried to put that dilemma in an XY graph (I’d love your thoughts on it). Here, Done and Perfect are again different but now equal, not fighting each other, each at the end of the two axes.
When you start something, and it’s Wrong — I’m carefully avoiding say bad — then that’s Good. If you keep working on it and it’s wrong, it’s still ok assuming you learn, but if you reach your Done state and the work is Wrong, then this is unacceptable; a No!
Because the rhetoric of Done doesn’t have to support the “move fast and break things” culture. On the contrary, it is against broken things (unless, of course, your definition of done includes something to be broken).
In the second column, the more you work towards both Perfect and Done, fixing your mistakes, you’ll find the work in the zone of Great, Well Done and Can do better. They go from the more exciting to the less as you move closer to Done since you have to deliver it. Something Done but not Perfect (the top of that column) is what the “better done than perfect” means. The addition of the exclamation mark on the “Can do better!” shows that the result is done, acceptable, not wrong, and able to teach us things.
Last, in the third column, things are getting interesting. If you start with something Perfect is Awesome, since it’s not Wrong, and you still have time to refine it. The more you go closer to Done being Perfect (you said so) then you’ll end up with the reaction of “Can’t do better?” starting yet another loop of iterations.
It’s all about spending your time wisely, reframing the problem, questioning your ideas, work with others (most probably your audience), take time to contemplate, and have fun!
Go ahead! Start something new and make it good. And keep working on it. As Salvador Dali said once, “Have no fear of perfection — you’ll never reach it.”