A Job Worth Doing…

English writer G. K. Chesterton once wrote: "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." That might seem counter-intuitive, and it seems to go against the received wisdom that "any job worth doing is worth doing well".  

There have been many interpretations of exactly what Chesterton was suggesting, but it’s plain it was not meant to promote shoddy workmanship or mediocrity. It does suggest, though, that the very act of attempting something, even if the results are not optimum, is better than not attempting at all. A similar point of view holds that even if you're not very good at an activity (like painting or calligraphy, for instance), but enjoy doing it, go ahead and enjoy yourself. Maybe you'll get better, but even if you don't, you'll have fun in the process.

Chesterton champions the 'amateur', the non-professional, when it come to things that we actually can do, even if not very well. Perhaps the most important take away is this: you learn from your mistakes. If you don't try something because you might fail or you might not do a perfect job, you'll never learn perseverance or satisfaction for a job actually completed. Even if it was mediocre.

There are more than a few articles about this; here’s a pretty good one.

Of course, there’s also a certain entertainment value to some really shoddy workmanship (as long as it’s inconsequential to health and safety). Maybe these guys didn’t even try, or maybe they just had fun producing inferior work. Probably a good thing they didn’t go into medicine or flying.

-Tom New

“Perfect is the enemy of good is an aphorism which means insistence on perfection often prevents implementation of good improvements. The Pareto principle or 80–20 rule explains this numerically. For example, it commonly takes 20% of the full time to complete 80% of a task while to complete the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort.[1] Achieving absolute perfection may be impossible and so, as increasing effort results in diminishing returns, further activity becomes increasingly inefficient”.   -Wikipedia