Perfection or Good Enough
It is now late on Monday afternoon and I have not posted since sometime late Friday night. My apologies for being such a slacker. Sometimes being a slacker is the one thing I can be good enough to succeed at the task. Anyway, I really meant to get a lot more work done on the projects I have at hand and to accomplish at least three or four more posts in the process. Instead, I ended up just chilling. Do not get me wrong, I did get some writing work and now I have so many blog idea notes here and there that I find myself having the complete opposite of a writer’s block.
What exactly do I mean by that. Well, I have so many good ideas of what I think would make an interesting a blog posting that I tend to get caught up in the moment of reviewing them and coming up with the perfect one for the current moment that I end up not writing one at all and instead spanning off to at least two or three more ideas before I am wearing on my own tolerance levels and end up putting things aside and watching television instead.
Now for those that know me a little, they know I generally do not watch much television. So spending the weekend in a hotel with a full assortment of cable options and the olympics available to boot was such a sweet temptation. However, for those few that know me really well, part of the reason I try so hard to minimize to television is I can have tendency to get sucked into it and accomplish so little. This is especially true of things like old movies, the history, discovery, and other similar pseudo learning channels, and of course a sport that I have a true interest in as sport, regardless of who is actually playing. So, while trying to find something that could be good enough to eventually become perfection to post this weekend, I trailed off into watching a commercial laden Bourne Ultimatum, which I own on DVD and the Midlands (or perhaps it Great Lakes) region of little league playoffs (Indiana has got some awesome 12 year pitchers by the way, though Ohio was not shabby on the mound either), intermixed with the bright spots from China of course.
Anyway, I digress much too much – though I am not sure that is true either. I actually started this as an additional update and list of reasons of why I didn’t post much over the weekend. However, I realized the why was much to my lack of having to many options and not really feeling like any of them were perfect and hence why it was easy to allow myself to get sucked into the boob tube so easily. That fit with something I was reading for the office today very nicely.
Over at TechRepublic they are having a bit of a debate about computer security, in particular it goes back to windows and the Bill Gates era – but it has evolved. Anyway, the last article in the series as of today titled Perfection vs. Good Enough and explores finding the balance between the two. After all, if you strive for and will accept nothing less than perfection you will basically freeze yourself into not trying anything at all, because most of us know that we will never achieve 100% perfection – no matter the actual task. On the other hand, if we are always just willing to accept that measure at which it is just good enough, we will never strive in the direction of making things better, or trying reach a little bit closer to perfection and hence will likely miss things we could have accomplished otherwise.
As it applies to computer security it should be obvious that we have to reach toward perfection, but have to adopt the open source view of “publish often,” in order to head off what threats we can as we can, or as we are good enough. Otherwise, if get caught up in just trying to get every last security hole closed up before we move, we will always be searching for that one more security patch solution and never release anything to plug up any security holes. On the converse, if we patch a few minor things and decide that is good enough it leaves miles and miles of room that we really need to cover.
Anyway, this post is obviously being less the perfect as I am going just all over the place with it. Hopefully though it will be good enough and in so doing will keep me moving toward the goal of perfection. If it seems like I am hammering those in to you, well that is really not my intent, but rather it is hammer them into me. I think there is a balance in all aspects of life that has to achieved that is somewhere there between good enough and perfection. I think I realized that some time back without having put words too it. But ask folks that know how likely I would have been to give swing dancing, or much any dancing a try before, knowing I would be less the perfect. And ask anyone how competitive I can be out in the tilt yard just doing skills-at-arms exercises for practice – because guess what – I have to be as perfect as I can be, even pushing the corners on an SCA heads pattern as tight as possible over and over – and don’t even ask them how it comes out when doing a show in front an audience, my conscience might embarrass me.
Anyway, the short of all this is something like this: Writing this public blog has made me realize we all fall short of perfection in a lot of things and really it isn’t about so much winning, or being perfect all the time, but striving toward that perfection and willing to accept we have put in our best effort toward perfection and accomplished what is good enough. More importantly that we don’t always take ourselves to seriously, and when we are good enough, that there is still room for improvement toward perfection. Anyway, I am so far from that now I think it time to call it good enough and publish.
