PERFECT Doesn't Exist

Knowing When Good Enough is Good Enough.

Waiting for the perfect moment is a fool's errand

To this day, I cannot figure out at what point in my life I started becoming a perfectionist.

As a child I was always trying new things, quickly moving on to the next toy or game, if the one I was playing with started to bore me.

The idea of 'perfect playtime' never existed. There was no such thing as having enjoyed something so perfectly that I could never possibly enjoy it again. I just played with something until I felt that I had enough.

It was the same when I started getting older and had more responsibilities. Things needed to be done a particular way in order for them to be considered 'finished', but there was never a state in which washing the dishes or mowing the lawn was ever 'perfect'.

Of course there was always something more that could be done to make the glass shine just a little bit more, or the yard look that little bit more manicured. But if I was to follow that reasoning to its insane conclusion, the glass or plate would never be clean enough to be used again, and the lawn would probably end up growing back from all the time that was spent 'perfecting' the way it looked.

Things only got worse for us as adults in the real world, especially when it came to job performance. If you were exceptionally good at your job, very rarely would you reap the benefits of your additional skills. Instead, management would quickly recognise how much more profit they were making from your skillset, and they would make sure you understood, that in order to keep your job, your output would always need to be at that high level. The level of 'good enough' for your role had gone up to a new 'normal' which would rarely be sustainable in the long run.

Perfection Means Death

Think about this: a tree never reaches the level of being 'perfect'. I mean, it never stops growing and proclaims itself as the ultimate tree. It just keeps growing. It's all it can do, and it's all we hope it continues doing for as long as possible.

People are the same. We don't really want a final state for anything.

If tomorrow Apple announced that they were releasing the "Final iPhone", and they refused to make any further improvements and iterations, how how boring would that be? Would anyone want to buy it knowing that this is it?

As humans, we love change. We love iteration. We don't like finality, because finality means death.

We go out of our way to experience the next greatest thing. It's in our DNA to constantly evolve, improve, and be better than we were yesterday.

Even though we are well aware of the ironic reality of entropy, that no matter how good you become, you are also aging and getting worse at the same time. Like a bucket that can never stay filled because of an unfixable hole in the bottom which is constantly getting bigger.

So what is it that stops us from putting something out there, until it has reached a state of 'perfection'?

As a photographer I am always faced with this dilemma. I could share a photo of something cool with the rest of the world right now. However, I will hold off doing so because I don't feel that the photo is perfect enough in its current state. I might see something wrong with its composition or framing, or I will hate the way I have edited it.

Then, to make matters worse, tomorrow I will have changed my mind again, and I might love everything about the photo.

However, instead of sharing it right there and then, I will question myself. I will sabotage my confidence by asking "why did I not like it yesterday but am suddenly happy with it today?" Something must be wrong with my judgement, and I will refuse to share the photo because of that.

In the words of Bart Simpson, "You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't".

The Sweet Spot

Strategically placed puddles are the best kinds of puddles

But there is a way to get out of this rut, and it involves a recognising that everything has a sweet spot.

We need to understand that everything has its built-in point of perfection beyond which we start to see diminishing returns. That is also the peak-point from which it is safe (and often preferable) to iterate.

Think about driving a car. If you're a manual transmission guy like me, you know that every engine has a sweet spot in the rev range which produces the most horsepower, and changing gears at that precise moment gives you the fastest acceleration.

That sweet spot is where you simply cannot get any more power out of the engine until you shift up, no matter how many more RPM the odometer says are available to you.

That sweet spot will be completely different if your aim is to drive as economically as possible.

The same principle applies to photography. Every camera has a sweet spot when it comes to image quality. Actually, with cameras, that spot is pretty much always at base ISO, so that one is easy to recognise.

However, when it comes to lenses, every single lens has an image quality sweet spot which is determined by its aperture.

Yes, a lens with an f/1.2 aperture is awesome, but is it still so awesome if every single photo taken wide open is soft and lacks contrast?

Depending on their quality, most lenses hit their sweet spot about 2-3 stops above wide open, and some even higher than that. This means that the sharpest, most contrasty images your favourite f/4 lens will produce will be between f/8 and f/11. Having the ability to go higher or lower is not always preferred, especially if your intention is to shoot the sharpest and cleanest photos possible.

When editing a photo, it's a good idea to know ahead of time what a 'sweet' edit of that photo would look like. Then try to get as close to that level as possible, knowing that tomorrow your idea of sweet will probably change, so there is no point overdoing it. Be free in the knowledge that you could end up with two great photos instead.

Learning to recognise the sweet spot in everything you do, is the key to not getting stuck in perfectionism hell. It frees your mind to let go of the current task, and primes you to create something better in the next iteration.

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Happy shooting!