The Problem with "Good Enough"

Throughout my life I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we easily settle into things that are considered “good enough”. Not bad, not broken, just… acceptable. Take chickenpox, for example, an infection caused by the varicella virus. For decades, it was treated almost like a childhood milestone, something inconvenient but inevitable that children caught, recovered, and just moved on from. There wasn’t some grand failure in the system, we weren’t ignoring a crisis. We were just operating within what seemed like a reasonable balance of risk, cost, and effort at the time. But once the varicella vaccine came along, it quickly shifted that baseline. What used to be manageable now became preventable, and in the process, we also reduced the risk of shingles later on in life. Shingles is also caused by the varicella virus, and is a painful condition that most people never really connected to their chickenpox infection, and it was an unintended benefit that was only discovered after the varicella vaccine was rolled out. It’s interesting because the real lesson here isn’t that we were wrong before, but that “good enough” shouldn’t be where we stop thinking. Even when something makes sense in its time, it’s still worth revisiting when new possibilities open up.

This mindset doesn’t just belong in medicine or big, high-stakes decisions. It shows up everywhere once we start noticing it. There’s a whole category of small, invisible improvements that don’t change our lives in any dramatic way but simply make things just a bit smoother. Using an ice-scoop instead of your fingers is a tiny comfort and hygiene upgrade. A shoehorn saves you a couple of seconds every morning, removes the discomfort of squishing your fingers, and might extend the lifespan of your shoes. Soft-close drawers, contactless payments, autocorrect, none of these are revolutionary, but they all chip away at the friction in daily life. This is the quiet power of striving for better, even when things were already “fine”. We often underestimate how much hidden value lies in marginal gains. On their own, they’re easy to dismiss as overthinking or unnecessary optimisation, but taken together, they reflect a quiet philosophy – if something can be made easier, cleaner, or more comfortable, why shouldn’t we strive for it?

This idea becomes more powerful once we scale it beyond personal habits and into how we design shared public spaces. Accessibility features are the clearest example of this. Ramps are often framed as accommodations for wheelchair users, but they also make life easier for parents with strollers, travellers dragging suitcases, delivery workers moving heavy loads, and anyone who’s appreciated not having to deal with stairs at the wrong moment. The same can be said for automatic doors, clearer signage, or tactile paving. Captions on videos can benefit everyone in a noisy environment or quiet offices. They’re designed with specific accessibility needs in mind, but they end up benefitting far more people than originally intended. The best improvements don’t just solve a problem for one group, but instead they raise the baseline for everyone, often in ways that only become obvious after the fact.

There is a distinction between optimisation and refinement. Optimisation often feels like a hobby or obsession. I’ve often spent hours on a spreadsheet looking for ways that could perhaps save three seconds for myself in the future. Refinement is all about removing micro-frictions. There is a mechanical satisfaction in things that just work better. When you remove friction from a system, whether it’s a software workflow or morning routine, you free up cognitive load for more important tasks. It’s less about chasing perfection, and more about reducing annoyance.

The takeaway here isn’t that we should obsessively optimise every corner of our lives or chase some rigid idea of perfection. There are real trade-offs with cost, complexity and diminishing returns, and not every improvement is worth pursuing. But there’s a difference between thoughtful refinement and passive acceptance. It’s easy to assume that if something isn’t actively causing problems, it’s not worth rethinking, and that’s actually the bigger trap. How many things do we keep doing simply because they work well enough, not because they’re actually the best we can do? The danger isn’t that we aim too high and overcomplicate things, it’s that we quietly and passively stop asking whether things could be better at all, because they always can be. Ultimately, we need to fight against the status quo bias, our tendency to mistake the familiar for the optimal.

Progress rarely feels dramatic. It’s not always a breakthrough headline. It’s often just a series of small decisions to refine, adjust, and improve things that already function. A vaccine for a disease we used to accept, a ramp where there used to be stairs, a small tool that makes a daily task easier. None of these feel monumental on their own. But over time, they change what we consider normal. And perhaps that’s the real point – not to chase perfection as some distant ideal, but to keep nudging the baseline upwards, one small deliberate improvement at a time, instead of deciding that “good enough” is where we stop. Because we can always do better. Therefore, we should.