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Progress Beats Perfect

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

101 pointsingve28 comments

This is all a big problem with unrealistic expectations.

> If I get one percent better each day for one year, I'll end up thirty-seven times better by the end of the year.

This, too, is an unrealistic expectation. To get better every day (or even most days!) is very hard to do and can put you on the defensive as much as the quest for perfection.

To me, the spirit of this 1% better every day is to have at least tried to be better. That alone counts as or at least towards the 1%. It’s not something you literally measure, but just aiming for. 1% of a day could be as much as changing a thought pattern. It could be not drinking that Coke Zero today - note to self. It could be not letting the full trash can in the bathroom spill over. It’s more about the intention than the measure.

Agreed, but it also has to be noted that this intention, if you remind yourself of it constantly, can fill you with dread add unwillingness which can grow to be a huge self-imposed psychic block.

I want to be better but I've dropped the "every day" trope. That's a meaningless and toxic hustling that only works when you are in your 20s.

Progress is not linear. We are not machines.

Even a machine can't make a linear progress if it doesn't get a steady (or an ever-increasing) energy input or if it can't internalize its previous experience and transform it to a more efficient algorithm.

To me, like you, the most important is the never-ending intention. I'm a pre-diabetic and I have very bad days during which the only thing I could do is eat, poop, drink water, nap, repeat 3-4 times, and the day is gone. But I don't lose sight of my goals and when my energy is back I am catching up on a few important items from my mental backlog, almost every time.

That's the important thing IMO: have a vision, never forget your vision, act on it when you're able. Don't guilt-trip yourself, ever.

Adding to this, it’s hard to know if you are actually getting “better” because it’s so hard to measure. My approach is to try to get better between reflection periods while also scheduling days for self reflection on that goal.

I am 50/50 on if a conscious self-reflection will give you the birds-eye view. For some it might work, for me it doesn't.

Meditation definitely achieves that for me however.

And paying a bit more attention to each moment is less harsh than than trying to increase numeric metrics of “good” or “evil” each day. Paying attention is simple enough you can tell if you are having trouble with it or not without numbers. Although people are good at fooling themselves, they are also able to see thru a brick wall given enough time and stillness.

It's really both intention and action. Intending to take out the trash is meaningless if it's already spilled over. We need more than beliefs to make progress.

I believe OP is talking about both going at your own realistic pace (whatever that means for you), and also actually going.

What's wrong with Coke Zero?

We have to be honest about what “1% better every day” fights against.

For an example, we have lots of time on a day to complete a task but we end up doing nothing on it. Instead we tell ourselves we’ll do a marathon session the next day to make up for it. Only the next day comes and we don’t feel like doing it anymore than we did the previous day. And now we’re dreading it because we set ourselves up having to pull a marathon session. So we do nothing again.

nkozyra: This is all a big problem with unrealistic expectations.

> If I get one percent better each day for one year, I'll end up thirty-seven times better by the end of the year.

OP also seems to assume that 1% improvement today is same effort/as easy as 1% improvement yesterday. it becomes harder to improve by 1% as time goes on, just coz your baseline is compounded too but absolute effort/difficulty may not. 3.65 rather than 37.78 at the end of the year is probably closer to the truth (and that is if one is able to do this every day at all to nkozyra's point)

Have you tried applying this for 4 years yet? Are you now 177 times better than when you started?

> This, too, is an unrealistic expectation. To get better every day (or even most days!) is very hard to do and can put you on the defensive as much as the quest for perfection

Not just getting better every day (which already is very hard) but getting exponentially better every day! That is just plain ludicrous idea.

It's not meant to be taken that literally.

>This, too, is an unrealistic expectation.

"We evolve beyond the person we were a minute before! Little by little, we advance a bit further with each turn. That's how a drill works!"

I honestly read "Postgres beat perfect" and imagine an article about just using PostgreSQL for all your early features. Features like Full-text search, Documented DB, distributed tasks running, etc., and not worrying about scale and always know that is better to have it ready for customers than keep them waiting for the best tool for the work

I read it the same !

Hate to quote the psychopath The Joker from the Dark Knight, but when he was talking to Harvey Dent in the hospital he said ‘it’s all about fear’ (roughly).

If you don’t understand the motivation for progress then all the symptoms of procrastination kick in.

I’m not super content in my job and it gives me anxiety. It’s like being in a foxhole that you feel unsafe in. Therefore, to achieve peace, I have to either find another foxhole or make it so I can find safety.

That’s decent enough motivation for now. One day I hope I can be driven by something happier.

Best thing my first boss ever told me and I find my self repeating to my self all the time - “perfection is the enemy of good”

Loads of people are on quickfire mode, judging every little "but we could do better" as "perfect" and throwing out that phrase. It is really annoying. When you want to invest a little more time, because you already know, what problems will bite you in your behind later, and then you hear that phrase.

Whoever outputs that phrase should first think about whether they are stopping improvement, by labelling it as "perfect", to make it match this pseudo-wise phrase.

I hear ya it’s not really something I want to tell people or be told more it’s a great thing to tell yourself to enable you to sometimes push past a very hard problem…. Like ok big picture I could keep optimizing this sort routine or I could deliver the stats to the end user tomorrow by just finishing the table UI to show a number… I totally agree with you it’s just more of a tool you can use to help yourself push on and not get consumed by a detail that may or may not matter… it’s like this is the art side of programming that isn’t always obvious- is it important to get this detail right or can we get it good enough… sometimes it’s important sometimes it’s not

> .. problems will bite you in your behind later, and then you hear that phrase.

Then maybe you could reply: "yes but at least it has to be good enough. It isn't, yet -- this and that and that will come back and bite us"

Now, get most 'bosses' to understand this concept. If you expect perfection and punish good, then you get people who only push for perfection.

There's a delicate balance from management to push people to try and create something better and pressuring them in every way they can to deliver perfection. From my experience, it tends to land on the latter.

i have another one:

  "don't let good be the enemy of what is actually needed"

Pursue excellence, not perfection. Try to be the best that you can be, but accept that you will make some mistakes.

This is along the lines of “systems over goals.” Eg. walk for 30 minutes every day vs lose 30 pounds.

To progress I have to learn then to practice.

For any "applied" discipline practicing imperfectly lets me memorize bad form.

Therefore a (as much as possible) more advanced practitioner than me must periodically check my practice. He must understand that some parts of the discipline may have to be adapted to each practitioner (his 'perfect' practice may not be mine)...

For anything not completely theoretical (is if even possible?) this is a can of worms.

Incremental progress is helpful when you do not know in which direction you need to go but leads you only into local maxima. Sometimes you know how to get closer to the global maxima and you have to do that, otherwise competition will do it and leave you behind.

progress isn’t exponential. Walking 10 miles today doesn’t make walking 10 miles tomorrow that much easier.

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