Good Enough Isn't Settling. It's Wisdom.
The hidden cost of always trying to make it better.
I was still editing my promotion packet. I’d spent numerous evenings pulling together this document.
Not because anything was wrong. I’d already made the case. The impact was there. The examples were strong. The links to artifacts and presentations were embedded. The endorsements were included. But I kept finding one more proof point to add, one more sentence to sharpen, one more accomplishment to reframe, one more way to make it airtight. I told myself I was being thorough. That the stakes were high enough to deserve it.
But airtight according to whom?
At some point I wasn’t strengthening the case anymore. I was delaying the moment I had to declare it done. Because as long as it wasn’t submitted, it couldn’t be judged.
It wasn’t really about making it better anymore. It was about postponing uncertainty. Somewhere along the way, I’d quietly confused optimization with control.
And I’m not alone.
I see this constantly with the women I coach. Not just in high-stakes documents like this one, but in meetings, emails, and the moment just before they’d speak up. The pattern is rarely a lack of ability. It’s a reluctance to trust that what they’ve already created is enough. So they keep refining. Keep preparing. Keep waiting until it’s just a little bit better.
The irony? That instinct often comes from the very qualities that make them exceptional: thoughtfulness, diligence, and high standards. But eventually those strengths cross an invisible line. They stop making the work better and start making it harder to let go.
Optimization is addictive
It feels productive. You feel in control. You feel responsible. And the qualities that keep you in that loop, the thoroughness, high attention to detail, are exactly the ones we’re praised for. Especially as women. We’re taught early that being careful is how you earn credibility, that over-preparing is how you avoid being caught short. So when we keep polishing, it doesn’t feel like a flaw. It feels like diligence.
But there’s a difference between improving something and not trusting that it’s already enough. Most of the time, “one more pass” isn’t about the work anymore. It’s about not yet believing that it’s good enough as it is.
People, careers, leadership — they don’t work like a spreadsheet you can perfect until the formula resolves clean. You can’t optimize a relationship, a team, a career, the way you can optimize a process. You can only show up for it, imperfectly, again and again. Chasing a polished version of something inherently messy isn’t rigor. It’s a way of avoiding the mess, of working within the imperfection.
Diminishing returns, and what they actually cost
Engineers and technologists have a name for this: the law of diminishing returns. Your first pass gets you 70-80% of the way there. The next revision gets you to 90%. Another gets you to 93%. Three more get you to 95%. The input required for each additional percent keeps climbing, while the output barely moves.
Most of the value showed up early. Most of the stress shows up late.
And it’s not just inefficient. Every extra revision costs something real:
Momentum: the energy that made the work feel alive in the first place.
Courage: the longer you sit with something, the more room there is to talk yourself out of it.
Learning: you can’t learn from what you haven’t sent, published, or tried.
Opportunity: every hour spent polishing something already ready is an hour not spent on the next thing. Perfection doesn’t just delay progress. It quietly narrows what’s possible.
What this costs leaders specifically
I see this most clearly in leadership and in the leaders I coach. Leaders who over-optimize wait too long to:
delegate: because no one will do it exactly the way they would
decide: because there’s always one more data point to gather
speak up: because the point isn’t quite polished enough yet
ensure they have every answer: before admitting they’ve already got enough of one
Meanwhile, someone else just goes. They hit send on the imperfect version or share their initial thinking. And now they’re out ahead, experimenting, learning, adjusting in real time, while you’re still evaluating a draft that was ready two rounds ago.
From judgment to curiosity
Underneath most over-optimizing is quiet self-judgment. It’s a belief that the outcome, and by extension you, aren’t quite enough yet. The way out isn’t to lower the bar or accept less of yourself. It’s to change the question you’re asking.
Optimization asks: how do I make this perfect?
Experimentation asks: what can I learn if I try?
Brené Brown writes about this in The Gifts of Imperfection: the practice of showing up as you actually are, rather than the polished version you think you’re supposed to be. Stephen Guise makes a more tactical version of the same case in How to Be an Imperfectionist: that momentum, not mastery, is what actually compounds. Both are pointing at the same shift: from proving to trying, from judgment to curiosity.
Experiments don’t require perfection. They require movement.
Diving in, again
When I launched this newsletter, I wrote about standing at the edge of the pool, and how the hardest part was never the swimming, it was trusting myself enough to dive in. Turns out that edge doesn’t go away. It just shows up again, differently: not as fear of starting, but as an endless case for why you’re not quite ready to stop.
Sometimes excellence isn’t found in one more revision.
It’s found in pressing go.
In diving in.
Send.
Publish.
Submit the proposal.
Have the conversation.
Share your perspective.
Start before you feel completely ready. Because eventually, “better” becomes the enemy of “real.”
Good enough isn’t the moment your work becomes flawless. It’s the moment additional effort creates less value than moving forward.
Where are you still polishing something that’s already ready? Where have you confused another revision with meaningful progress?
And what would happen if “good enough” wasn’t about lowering your standards, but about choosing to spend your energy on what matters next?