Eight outta ten
It doesn’t matter whether Kao Soy Nimman is the best restaurant in the world. All I know is, it couldn’t be better. (Chiang Mai, Thailand, October 2022)
I recently created a new website.
Creating websites is right up there near the top the list of the hardest things for me to do.
There are so many things that a website could be that it is difficult to focus and figure out what it will be.
In order to sidestep the potential overwhelmingness, I tried to to make the project as small as possible. A minimum viable website, if you will.
I figured it would take two hours. It took four. And there are another thirty to fifty hours I could put into it to make it pretty much complete.
But in the meantime, It does what it needs to do. It’s a place I can send someone where they can find out what I do and maybe even pay me money.
Moving forward, it will be a lot easier to make improvements and additions to this website than it was to build it. What a relief to have built it.
My friend Amanda, upon seeing this new website, reminded me that my approach here mirrors my approach to teaching people to practice piano. Instead of trying to learn a whole piece in one go, I help students to learn it in tiny slices. And instead of trying to get one of those slices polished to perfection, students aim for an eight on a scale from one to ten, based on the student’s own self-assessment of how comfortable they are with the material.
Eight outta ten is liberating. It means that we don’t have to be perfect. It means that we can get better later. It means that good enough can be good enough.
The 80/20 rule (the Pareto Principle) suggests that 80% of our results come from 20% of our effort. Along those same lines, though, it is often the case that the last 20% of performance comes from an additional 80% of effort.
There are situations in which doing the last 80% of the work is worth it to get closer to 100% (Tenth-Grade-Casey was a master at applying this principle to exams and not so great at picking up that last 20% on term papers). But there are plenty of situations in which it’s not worth it — when all that conscientiousness leaves us tired, burned out, and no longer able to tell what’s working and what’s not.
It seems to me that we will demonstrate better performance if we give ourselves time to come back later and do another 8/10 pass, and another the next time. We eighty-twenty the last 20, again and again, little by little, as the gap between what we achieve and what we hoped to achieve becomes infinitesimally small.
What that means for me right now is that the rest of the work to be done on the website will suggest itself to me as I revisit and reassess. Tomorrow, I will see things I can’t see today, just as I can hear new things in my piano pieces with each new day of practice. I don’t have to push myself hard or grind through long hours. I can keep shooting for eight out of ten, applying that standard to new additions to the website or aspects thereof.
In fact, most of the things I do are grounded in “eight outta ten.” Does that make me a C student? Maybe. Well, C students are probably the ones who are having the most fun.
Somewhere, I will strive for greatness. In some aspect of my life, I will put everything I have into making something just right. But in the meantime, being satisfied with “good enough” is what gives me the confidence (and perhaps audacity) to keep going, keep trying new things, and keep sharing them. I invite you to do the same.
