Good Enough: A Manifesto For Adequacy
This is an article with a simple premise: the best in life is not for you.
I don’t mean this an an insult, quite the opposite. The best in life is a ruinous thing to get used to, and it costs way out of proportion to what satisfaction you’re liable to get out of it. Instead, what I’m advocating for you is Good Enough: the point where you can derive as much satisfaction as possible for as little time, money and effort as possible.
There’s a long-standing rule known as the 80/20 rule, with multiple meanings. 20% of the staff do 80% of the work. The last 20% of any task takes 80% of your efforts. I’m her to pitch a different meaning to you.
You get 80% of the benefits for 20% of the price.
That’s it: it’s a simple and straightforward rule of thumb. Your morning single-origin coffee made by a hipster barista in an aggressively cool cafe with graffiti on the walls done by a renowned local street artist? You can knock out a coffee at home that’s 80% of the way there for 20% of the cost. Your friend’s gigantic German-brand saloon car that can top 200 kilometers an hour and cost as much as a three-bed house in the Midwest? There’s a Czech-made saloon that can comfortably do 150 and uses slightly cheaper fittings, and once again it’s about 20% of the cost. Hell, there are entire business empires built on this concept: what is Ikea but this 80/20 maxim writ large?
You might blanch at the idea of settling for adequacy. But here’s the reason this matters: unless you’re incredibly wealthy, you’re going to have to compromise somewhere. Nobody on a $40k annual salary is driving a Mercedes, drinking barista-made V60 coffee, and eating out at Michelin-starred restaurants once a month — and if they are, they’re going to go bankrupt pretty fast. You get to choose whether that compromise is controlled and comfortable, or whether you’re left with holes in your socks because you overspent on a new flagship-model phone.
Starting from here, I’ll be taking a weekly look at a specific field to see whether the 80/20 rule applies, and to identify the sweet spot where you can get as much as possible for your money, your time, or your effort.
- Disclaimer: this article is written for an audience that already earns a reasonable amount of money. Nothing of what’s above should be taken as a criticism of people doing their best on a limited budget: that’s not what this is about.
