17th June 2024
Paul McCartney once talked about how The Beatles used time as a filter to create so many memorable songs. “There were no recording devices,” McCartney explains. So if they weren’t in the studio when they had an idea, “we had to remember it…
There was no such thing as cassettes or anything to put the idea down on, so you just had to remember.”
He said they began to realize this was actually a good thing. “We said, if we forget it tomorrow, it’s no good.
How can we expect the public to remember it if we can’t, and we only wrote it yesterday?
So, we realized that we were writing songs that were memorable not because we wanted them to be memorable, but because we had to remember them.”
They were not trying to be perfect; they were just trying to create good music.
I love the quote by Voltaire, ‘Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the Good.’
A twenty-minute walk that I do is better than the four-mile run that I don’t do,
The imperfect blog that gets posted is better than the perfect writing that doesn’t leave my laptop,
The dinner of Zomato food delivered at home is better than the elegant dinner that is always planned but never hosted.
The idea is simple: if you keep looking for something that is perfect, you will end up rejecting what is good enough. There is also the concept of the Nirvana Fallacy, which amounts to comparing perfect, unrealisable ideal situations to something that actually exists.
This is something which we face with the investors in our business very regularly. Everybody wants to time the equity market perfectly, to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. Most people will not buy because they feel markets are too expensive, later having a regret of having missed out on the rally and then will start waiting for another correction not realising that a new cycle has started and the old lows may never be touched again.
As the old saying goes, “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
Trying to make something perfect can actually prevent us from making it just good. Perfection in its elusive glory is like a unicorn. Sure, it sounds great, but who’s actually seen one?
I’d rather ride a real horse than wait for an imagined unicorn.
You’re capable of amazing things. But unless you let go of the idea of perfection, you’ll have a hard time achieving those amazing things.
The pursuit of perfection is noble, but unless we’re willing to settle for “good,” uswe may have to settle for nothing at all.
It is better to strive for progress than perfection and stay blessed forever.