Practice Makes Perfect?

Perhaps well-meaning friends or relatives have told you that you should strive for perfection. A Common proverb is: ‘If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well.’ Now what exactly can that mean with respect to your life? Does it mean that every time you undertake any task you should continue doing that task until you are certain you have reached your version of perfection, or at least until you are certain you can do no better? I don’t think so.

Every one of you is faced with constraints. A major constraint in your life is time. Everyone faces a scarcity of time. Therefore, while you are engaging in the job of doing something to perfection, you are not engaging in any other job (or any other pleasure, for that matter). Otherwise stated, every action on your part involves an opportunity cost. In plain English, the quest for perfection involves use of time and hence is costly to you, as you must give up other valuable alternatives to achieve it.

Let’s consider an example. The words you are reading are words that I put down on paper. I have spent so much time to type and check for the mistakes. Truthfully, I write the first draft, correcting that draft in order to write the second draft, and then sending the manuscript to one another for criticisms. When the comments came back I had to go through them and decide which ones were valid and which ones were not. Many of them were incorporated in the third and final draft of the manuscript. Then it went to the printing-shop, Chhayleang, for editing, page design and layout, printing, and distribution. During the production process the proofs were checked for any typographical errors.

Now why did I only write three drafts? Certainly I could have improved by writing the fourth draft and sent it for correcting and rewrite it again. But I didn’t do that. Why not? Because I think that the typographical errors are still probably have been caught in this text and, I made a decision that the additional benefits from the additional work would not be worth the additional costs.

So what you are reading is the result of an implicit comparison by me of the costs and benefits of our actions. We wanted this text to be well organized, but I know that it is not perfect. In most situations, whatever you do will not be perfect either, because you must incur an opportunity cost to achieve perfection: the value of the time use in any job.

A general rule of thumb could be as follows: Undertake any activity up to the point at which the marginal benefit equals the marginal cost.