Breadth Thrusts & Bread Crusts: Perfect vs Good Enough

JC Parets
August 18, 2022

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

I’ve got an old pair of Chaco sandals that I’m not ready to part with just yet. But the soles were becoming detached from the footbed, so I had to do a little repair work. 

I glued them up and started thinking about rigging a clamp to provide even pressure to help the glue set. Catching sight of a couple of bricks laying nearby, I realized that these would work just fine for this type of job.

Would a well placed clamp or two have produced a more textbook repair? Perhaps. But the bricks I had at hand worked just fine for this.

Two thoughts on this:

1. Don’t let the search for the perfect keep you from embracing the good enough. Whether it’s a project around the house or conditions in the market, reality is seldom a carbon copy of what you see in a textbook. The textbooks present a stylized average or specific examples from the past. Every project has its own quirks, every market cycle is different. 

If you expect everything to fit precisely, nothing will match up. Time gets wasted and opportunities are lost. When it comes to the market, we account for this by taking a weight of the evidence approach. We step back when necessary and get a sense of the picture rather than leaning in to analyze the brush strokes. 

2. A big part of wisdom born out of experience is knowing when and where you can take short-cuts. The other side of the coin is that we cannot abandon all discipline in all circumstances. Knowing the difference between wants and needs comes through experience. 

My brother-in-law is a builder. When we are working on something together outside and I’m being unnecessarily precise with a measurement, he’s quick to remind me that “this isn’t finish carpentry.” The first time I work through a new recipe in the kitchen, I follow the directions as closely as possible. Once I’ve gone through it a few times, I have a better understanding of what measurements and times have some flexibility and which do not.

In the market, there are always a lot of moving parts and the tools and signals you would like aren’t always present. We make decisions based on the information we have at hand, knowing that perfect is elusive. If you know what you are doing and think that the bricks that are available will work, stop looking for clamps. 

If it turns out they don’t, keep that in mind for the next time.    

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