Marginally Less Bad

I once heard a cartoonist describe his work as not so much improving as becoming marginally less bad. I think this might be a helpful way of looking at things. Measuring ourselves against perfection can be a discouraging exercise in futility. But if we measure ourselves against imperfection, we might find that metric a little easier to wrap our heads around. Nothing we ever do will be as good as it could be. Our very best moment, with our purest motives and putting our whole heart, might, mind and soul behind it, will be less than perfect. But if we can’t be perfect, if perfection is a complete and utter impossibility, then what is the point of trying at all? Because we can become less imperfect. We can get marginally less bad. Look, we have a desire to improve our lives, maybe even improve the world, and we’ve got an idea about how to do that, and we go out and act out this idea and bring it into being and the execution isn’t anything like what we had imagined and there are all of these unintended consequences we hadn’t considered or thought would be less terrible than they ended up being. This is called failure and we might as well get used to it because to a greater or lesser degree every action we take will be a failure when measured against absolute perfection. And we can be sad that our brilliant idea didn’t pan out like we had hoped and we can give up trying to improve our lives and the world around us, or we can take an honest look at how and why we failed and try to formulate a new idea that will avoid the pitfalls and shortcomings of the last idea. And we muster up the courage and we go out and make our idea into reality and guess what? Another failure. But a failure with a crucial difference. This time we are failing in a completely different way. And better yet, we’re failing in a marginally less bad way. Slowly, over time and beyond a lot of heartache and bruises, our failures will become less catastrophic, our attempts to fix our lives and the world around us will have more positive effects and fewer negative effects. Thomas Edison took a thousand tries to come up with a working lightbulb and said something to the effect of I’ve found a thousand ways on how not to create a lightbulb. But the point is, Edison didn’t create a perfect lightbulb. He created a lightbulb that was less imperfect than the thousand other things he tried. And a century later, I’m sure his best effort pales in comparison to even the tiniest and most insignificant lightbulb we have today. If we can approach each of our decisions and choices not with the aim of finding that one perfect solution, but choosing from a list of bad options the one that will do the most good to the greatest number of people and the least harm to the fewest number of people. If we know ahead of time that our effort will result in failure, we won’t be as devastated when it’s inevitably imperfect, and we also won’t be as loath to give it up and move on to the next great failure. If perfection is some distant mountain peak, we can hike and hike and hike and the top never seems any closer, even if we’re making a lot of progress. But if instead, we look at our last imperfect action and focus on becoming less imperfect than that, then we can actually measure that progress. If you’re hiking a mountain, and you are trying to see how far you can get from a particular tree, you can see the tree get smaller and smaller the higher you go, even if from your vantage point the peak above seems never to get any closer. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say it’s never useful to think about perfection or to aim for being perfect, but if our reaction to comparing ourselves to perfection is to slump down and sulk because none of our efforts ever measure up to perfection, then we might make more progress by focusing not on becoming more perfect, but on becoming less imperfect.