Good Enough

Within the last couple of months, I was fortunate enough to stumble across The Dilbert Blog, written and maintained by the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. One of his recent posts discussed the "Golden Happiness Ratio," which quantified the philosophy of "good enough."

For those of you too lazy to read the blog entry, Adams' theory essentially says that people who, on average, get things about 80% right are happiest. People obsessed with perfection are less happy because they suffer from the law of diminishing returns, and people who are consistently satisfied with less than80% are "serial losers." I tend to think that somewhere between 85 and 90% is a better number, but I agree with his premise.

Fast-forward to yesterday: I was responding to a comment on an earlier blog entry, when I noticed something I didn't like. My immediate reaction was to edit the post and fix the error, but before I started, the Golden Happiness Ratio came to mind and I let it go.

Letting it go was something of a new experience for me. I tend to subscribe to the "good enough" mentality overall, but I'm pretty meticulous about my blogging. Typos and grammatical errors drive me nuts, and I detest making posts that are unclear -- the type of post where my (five or so) faithful readers are left scratching their heads, wondering what the fuck I just said. As a result, letting this 'mistake' go was a new experience. It took a little bit of resolve, but saying "good enough" was pretty gratifying.